Do You Really Think It's Fair...

...that Blackeyed Susan's very first layer cake (and a three-layer, at that!) came out wonderfully perfectly? Every layer raised to the same height, and perfectly flat into the bargain:
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I wanted to share a photo of Don Quixote's birthday quilt:

Don's favorite color is Black, so the color choice was easy. I had made a black-and-white quilt for a gift last year, and so I added just a very few extra fabrics, and I was "good to go."

The pattern is called Chinese Coins. You may not know that Don Very Nearly Completed a novel during his college years. In this science fiction/political thriller, a Chicago native becomes Premier of China, under the name of Omicron. So I named the quilt Omicron's Coin of the Realm.

Now, for a few details! Don asked for a "little color" in his quilt. I decided to place these few pieces in a Fibonacci sequence, one of our family inside jokes. So, there are colored patches in places 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21, etc. in the rows of "coins."

I chose a Chinese red for one of the colored fabrics. I also have a fabric with chambered nautiluses (nautili?), one of the places in nature where the Fibonacci sequence occurs. I also used a fabric with multicolored puzzle pieces, the symbol of autism. (You may know that Don has Asperger's Syndrome.)

In just one of the squares, I used this cute "Nerds Rock" fabric. The little boy on the fabric looks remarkably like Don, when he was ten years old:

I found this great "numbers" fabric, which I used in four of the squares. If you have read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, you will recognize "42" as the answer to "Life, the Universe, and Everything":

I quilted the quilt in black thread (naturally!) with "X's" in the black-and-white areas, and circles in the yellow bars. The Greek letter Omicron is a circle; the circles could represent "coins"; and, they *could* be kisses-and-hugs, with the x's and o's. It's all about the love for my darlin' Don Quixote, who turns 32 on the 26th.

(by the way, I knew that Don liked the color orange, and I considered it for the alternating bars. However, it looked Jack-o-lantern--ish, so I chose yellow. Which ended up looking bumble-bee--ish :) . I didn't know that Don dislikes yellow. He 'llowed as how he'll attempt to live with it! Don has already had offers to take the quilt off his hands by my two Yellow-Lovers, Charming and Alvin Fernald....

My family is just so darn Helpful, aren't they?