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This week's Project QUILTING challenge is Follow Your Arrow. Our one requirement was to include an arrow shape. "Chevrons can be a very modern, streamlined arrow shape. You can find lots of patterns for arrowhead-and-feathered-shaft Robin Hood style arrows."

Immediately I looked for arrow prints and landed on this black and white Alison Glass print. I love a palette of black white and one color. I chose pink and decided to use 8 different pink solids. (These included Kona Azalea, Bright Pink, Pomegranate, Punch, and Watermelon. The others were unlabeled.)

I went with a simple checkerboard layout of 6 1/2" squares for my 24" x 24" NICU quilt. As of Saturday evening I hadn't sewn a stitch. I got up at 5:45am (the new time after time change) to finish up my quilt Sunday morning. Some speed choices in the interest of finishing before the deadline included: single piece of fabric for the backing, no basting quilt sandwich before quilting, minimal quilting, quilting in just one color thread: Aurifil 50wt Fuchsia (#4020) (if I had more time and more thread options I would have used a variety of pinks), chose remnant binding from my binding box, attached the binding with the same thread I quilted with, machine bound (as I usually do).

Tada!

I chose a lovely pink Alison Glass print for the back.

I'm linking up on Kim's blog for the Project QUILTING Follow Your Arrow challenge. One more challenge for the season, starting March 16!

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This week's Project QUILTING challenge is Birthstone. We were required to use the color of our birthstone. The stone for October is tourmaline. A quick internet search indicated that tourmaline can come in a variety of colors, not just the light pink we usually see in birthstone charts. I was particularly drawn to the watermelon tourmaline, which includes pink. With a Creating a Scrappy Slab lecture/demo last week for Silicon Valley MQG and another coming up tomorrow night for The Northwest Arkansas MQG I had scrappy slab on the mind.

I pulled out my pink, green and black and white scrap bins and set to pull out scraps in light and medium pink and light and dark green to start building some scrappy slab tourmaline.

I worked organically and eventually decided to build two quadrants of the stone and to raw edge appliqué it to a scrappy slab quilted background in white on black. My quilt finished at 6" x 8"

I am donating this piece to the SAQA Spotlight Auction 2025. The fundraiser auction coincides with the 2025 SAQA Conference, but you do not to be attending the SAQA conference or a member of SAQA. Bidding will be open to everyone via the Handbid platform March 26 to April 5. Today was the last day for SAQA members to complete the online submission form for donating artwork to the auction. Glad I got mine done just in time!

The SAQA Spotlight Auction mats each art quilt, so the viewable portion of the quilt is 4 1/2" x 6 1/2".

I'm linking up on Kim's blog for the Project QUILTING Birthstone challenge.

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This week's Project QUILTING challenge is Common Blocks, requiring us to use a minimum of three common quilt blocks in our finished project. Initially I planned to make a NICU quilt with 10" quilt blocks, but after 6 days went by with no progress on the challenge, I downsized and got started today, then I downsized again to the finished project I have to share with you.

My tiny quilt finished at just under 2 1/2" x 3 1/2", featuring a log cabin block, a courthouse steps block, and flying geese.

I used Mini Series paper piecing patterns by Alison Glass & Giucy Guice.

Log Cabin
Courthouse Steps
Flying Geese

Thanks for visiting! I'm linking up on Kim's blog for the Project QUILTING Common Blocks challenge. Congratulations to everyone else who participated in the challenge this week. Next challenge drops on February 16th.