Yearly Archives: 2016

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I'm happy to be joining Lorinda and Trina for their Color Play Friday this week! This week's photo, Jetty Sunset, was taken by Lorinda. My job was to create a palette using colors from the photo and create a bundle of 5-8 fabrics inspired by my palette. You can find the full rules on their blogs (links below). None of us saw each other's selections in advance of our posts. I look forward to seeing the different interpretations from this beautiful photo.

I used Palette Builder 2.1 by Play Crafts to select my colors and determine the coordinating Kona solids. Then I surfed around some of my favorite fabric sites to find the coordinating prints.

Solids:
Kona Nautical
Kona Windsor
Kona Titanium
Kona Maize
Kona White

Prints:
Braidy in Navy by Rashida Coleman-Hale, Cotton + Steel
Block Party by Sew Caroline, Art Gallery
Swiss Dots in Gray by Riley Blake Designs
Lulabelle Petal in Yellow by Dodi Lee Poulsen, Riley Blake Designs
Handwriting in Silver White by Zen Chic, Moda

Check out the other palettes this week at:

If you'd like to participate in Color Play Friday you can visit In An Otter Life or Laurel, Poppy and Pine for the rules, their contact information, and next week's photo.

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I've made more progress on my secret sewing that I can't show you. ;-) I even managed to sew together some of the y-seams without a problem. I hope the rest of the mini goes together as smoothly. I can show you my small progress on January's Mighty Lucky Quilting Club piece. I've drooled over quilts using this technique, so I'm glad to have been pushed outside my comfort zone to try something new. Here's my first bias tape curve. I didn't have a specific plan, so I went with abstract. I'll be playing with how different widths behave. (This one is 1/2".) It was great to see some other examples in person at the Silicon Valley Modern Quilt Guild meeting last week as a number of our members are participating in the club this year.

I also enlarged the Bee Hive Double Star block pattern by Christa to an 18" block and assembled this mini quilt top. Not my normal color palette, but I'm very happy with how this came out. I especially love the placement of the matches fabric which I'm happy to finally be using.

I'm planning some grey crosshatch quilting and I think I'll use the grey cotton and steel fabric for the binding.

I finally finished stitching my last few rows of baseball snowball blocks together. If my brother was the same height now that he was in 2004 (when I "gave" him this quilt while he was in high school), and not 6'5", I'd totally be done with the quilt top. As it is, I need to have him come over and try on some quilts so I can decide how much border this quilt needs to be complete.

The good news is that I shared pictures with my brother, and he's still interested in this quilt. I find it a little bit busy and think that some solid borders will do it some good!

And speaking of quilts for my siblings, my sister is expecting her first baby in a couple months and I've got a Wizard of Oz themed baby quilt in the works. Right now I'm working on fashioning an Emerald City out of the Wondrous Woods Kona Fat Quarter pack. Look at all that excellent color!

I've been thinking about color a lot lately. I'm making some notes for an future blog series on color and I'm excited to participate in Lorinda and Trina's Color Play Friday this week. Look for my post on Friday and see each of our different takes on color inspiration from the same photo.

Thanks for visiting. What are you working on?

I'm linking up to WIP Wednesday at Freshly Pieced.

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As usual, it's a "little of this, little of that" kind of week. The biggest news is that instructions for the last step of the Midnight Mystery Quilt came out last Thursday and I finished my quilt top!

I'm so excited about this project and glad to have the quilt top done. I have the backing ready to piece and some fun variegated thread. I'm planning all over free motion quilting, but I haven't decided on a design. I'm open to ideas.

I also came out of Patchwork City hibernation to get one block done for the massive BOM project. This is Mixed Use. It's 8 1/2" square.

I picked a nice easy block with only squares and rectangles which was fast to put together, and it reminded me how much I love this project. I have some other more pressing sewing in the short term, but I look forward to getting back into this project. I also chose to use this block for my mini mini swap with Mary. Here's my (less than awesome) photo of the mini mini quilt top. Mary, I promise that it's actually a square. ;-)

This is a 4 1/2" square half size version of the block above. I enjoyed the fussy cutting (one of the reasons I love Patchwork City so much) and had fun squeezing seven different fabrics into this tiny project. I'm also totally digging how that green to green seam in the upper left accidentally came together. I'm unsure how I'll quilt it. You can visit Mary's blog to check out the beautiful line of fabric she has decided to use for the mini mini she's making me.

Here's my "secret sewing" project. I showed you my rainbow fabric for my Rainbow Mini Swap Hexie Tiles project last week. At this point, all of the paper piecing is done and I'm working on getting the units all pieced together. I've made a bunch of hexagons.

I think I'm at the point where I have to start sewing y-seams. So naturally, I set this aside to work on something else. The y-seams will have to wait. ;-)

This project is for round two of the Rainbow Mini Swap. I'm done showing peeks on Instagram in the interest of keeping it a surprise for my partner, but I'm super excited with how it's coming together so far. I look forward to sharing the finish with you in March after she's received it.

Lastly, I switched gears to a different (secret surprise) project last night and used my new Triangle Square Up Ruler for the first time. Love it! Talk about cutting my trimming time in half! You use this to trim the HST before pressing it open. A big thank you to Christa for sharing about it on a recent Periscope broadcast.

Thanks for visiting. I'm linking up to WIP Wednesday at Freshly Pieced.