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Saturday morning I took a six-hour class with Rebecca Bryan to make her Rainbow Remix quilt from her book Modern Rainbow. The book is filled with beautiful, rainbow eye candy. So many stunning quilts in a variety of styles!

Rainbow Remix is an improv strip-pieced quilt, which calls for fifty 10" squares. I went with solids, like in the book, and I think I ended up with 75 colors, which works great since I'd like a larger quilt.

I got my first 22 blocks made during class.

Here's a look at Rebecca's Rainbow Remix. She gave a design talk in the afternoon about piecing together the blocks into units to create the quilt top. I'm looking forward to having my completed blocks on my design wall to play around with.

Once again I found myself in class with a guildmate. (How fun to have so many common interests with these women I met four months after I signed up for my QuiltCon classes!) She and I have decided that we're going to work on our Rainbow Remix quilts at the May retreat. It'll be hard for me to keep my hands off all that rainbowy goodness, especially since I cut all my strips in class and just need a marathon sewing session to get them sewn together. Luckily, in the meantime I have plenty of other WIPs to choose from, like my improv crosses!

I was also in class with Silvia of A Stranger View. We were new quilt bloggers together and hang out online together on IG and Periscope. It was fun to discover that we had registered for the same class and would get to hang out together. Silvia sent me a few of her photos to share with you. The first is of me working on my rainbow-ish order. The foreground shows a classmate's palette. It was fun to see people working with non-solid fabrics. The second photo is of Silvia's palette. And the last one is of Silvia and Rebecca while they were working on the layout of Silvia's blocks.

 

I have two quilts to share from the show today. Both are related to Jessica of Quilty Habit. They also share the theme of trees. The first is Jessica's quilt, Home, in the Improvisation category. I love Jessica's eye for designing with improv piecing. Her artist statement reads:

"Home" is my tribute to everything comforting and natural - to me, this is my marriage. I was inspired by Carolyn Friedlander's Botanics fabrics to machine piece trees improvisationally. I chose low volume fabrics for a contemplative background. The trees each display the range of one color from darkest to lightest. Finally, on my home machine, I quilted woodgrain in the background to represent the rest of the forest, and swirls of wind high above. As Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros say, "Home is wherever I'm with you."

This second one that I'm sharing with you caught my eye both for the beautiful, saturated teals as well as for the orange peel appliqué, which made me think of Jessica, as it's one of her signature design elements. I immediately snapped a photo and sent it to Jess. Windy is by Emily Parson. It was in the Appliqué category. Her artist statement reads:

I was inspired by a crisp October day with a deep turquoise sky and the beautiful golden trees. I machine appliquéd the leaves and arranged them as if the wind was blowing the trees and making the leaves flutter around me. Stipple quilting in the background makes the leaves stand out.

 

Giveaway *closed*

I'm sharing some of my goodies from QuiltCon with one of you. I'll draw one winner on March 24th at 1pm PST out of all entries on my five posts about my QuiltCon classes. (This is the fourth of the five posts.) The drawing is open to everyone. To enter, please comment below and tell me one of the quilts on your bucket list. Followers can get a second entry by posting a second comment to tell me how you follow me (Bloglovin', Instagram, etc.). Thank you! Thank you to everyone who entered. The winner is Anja of Anja Quilts!

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Welcome to Color Play Friday. I missed last week when they featured a building in Minneapolis. This week we have this photo of a lovely bowl of Starburst candy. At first glance the photo reads as really PINK, which isn't exactly my favorite color to work with. Taking a closer look, there's actually an amazing number of color options in the reflection on the edge of the bowl. In addition to the pinks and reds from the candy, my initial color palette included a variety of blues and jewel tones in purples, blues, golds, and greens. I also had some grey in there as well.

As I worked through fabric selection I narrowed my palette. The first fabric I locked on was the Fruit Stand. I loved it for the colors as well as the play on the fruit flavors of the Starburst. I wouldn't be surprised if others chose this fabric as well this week! It would have worked in either color way, but I liked that this one brought in the navy color from my palette. And I loved how the Tula Pink Mosaic pulled in all the Starburst colors and worked with the colors in Fruit Stand. From there I moved on to blenders.

It's hard to tell from the thumbnail, but some of the print in the Fruit Stand fabric is in polka dots, which is what drove me to add a polka dot fabric to my palette. And while the Ultra Marine Crosshatch is a little out there and didn't match my green swatch perfectly (trust me, I hunted to find a better matching green in the photo!), I really liked what it added to the overall palette. The Lecien modern text fabrics had a number of possible colors from my original, larger palette and I really wanted to work one in since I love text fabrics.

There are NINE of us participating this week. (Links below.) I can't wait to see what everyone else came up with.

I created my palette with Palette Builder 2.1 by Play Crafts.

Solids:
Kona Nautical
Kona Everglade
Kona Punch
Kona Pomegranate
Kona Rich Red
Kona Snow

Prints:
Fruit Stand in Navy by Melanie Miller, Cotton & Steel
Crosshatch in UltraMarine by Carolyn Friedlander, Robert Kaufman
Painter's Canvas in Lipstick by Laura Gunn, Michael Miller
Text in Pink by Lecien
Mosaic in Magenta by Tula Pink, FreeSpirit Fabric
Le Cr'eme Swiss Dot Navy by Riley Blake Designs

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. Additionally, this month there's an opportunity to purchase Lorinda's bundle or Trina's bundle (or both) at Stash Fabrics. And visit Lorinda and Trina's blogs for a chance to win their bundles!

Thanks for visiting. If you're new here, check out my last three posts, where I'm sharing about the classes I took at QuiltCon and giving away a bundle of my QuiltCon goodies. :-)

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Friday was my day to explore the quilt show. My sister lives in Orange County and came up to spend most of the day with me, visiting the vendor booths and viewing the show. That evening I took Jeni Baker's Creative HST Piecing Class.

The class focused on techniques in Jeni's book, Patchwork Essentials: The Half-Square Triangle. She brought in a variety of fun and interesting examples (that you'd have thought I would have taken photos of!) to get our creative juices flowing. After a short intro into the many different options for doing something different with HSTs, Jeni gave us a ton of time to sew. As we worked, she walked the room checking in with everyone about what they were working on and assisting as needed. Jeni was delightful and encouraging.

I chose to work with my Swoon scraps, because quite frankly, they are my favorite color palette at the moment. Most of my fabrics were in strips, so I began by piecing a large slab of mostly strips. The strips that were pieced from multiple pieces of fabric were necessitated by using smaller scraps. (That wonky triangle attached to the right side was just so I'd be able to cut out my third square.)

Once my slab was created I cut three 6.5" squares (mostly because I had a 6.5" square ruler with me) on point from the slab. I have some usable sections left, but without further piecing, three was the max I could get out of my slab.

Then I paired these pieced squares with 6.5" squares of my white text fabric to make half square triangles. These were made using the two at a time method of marking the diagonal and sewing 1/4" on either side of it.

Finally I used navy squares paired with the above HSTs to make these units, using the same method as the previous step. From my initial three squares cut from my slab I'll have twelve of these units, but I ran out of time and navy fabric for making more during class. I'm looking forward to finishing these twelve and continuing further with this project.

 

Today I'm sharing a couple of my favorites from the show that featured transparency. I love the play with fabrics to achieve this look. It's a bit of an optical illusion. First, from the Piecing category, Triangle Transparency by Yvonne Fuchs. I love her large-scale, graphic design. Her artist statement reads:

As a Quilt Design a Day (QDAD) participant, one of the challenge prompts is to try to use transparency in your design. Triangle Transparency was one of my earliest QDAD designs, because the color palette for the day worked well with transparency play. I carefully curated a group of modern fabrics to turn the design into reality. My goal with the quilt is to show how powerful modern tonal prints can be when used in a large, graphic design meant to emphasize dramatic color play.

 

This next one had the added draw of a rainbow of color. I love how the quilting added to the design of the piecing. Color Study (Triangles) in the Use of Negative Space category is by Erika Mulvenna. Her artist statement reads:

I first studied Color Theory as a painting student, following exercises in mixing pigments to learn about color principles and interactions.

The inspiration for this piece comes directly from one of those primary Color Theory exercises; use the 12 colors of the Artist's Color Wheel to create a subjective color model. Red, my favorite color, is centered in the design. As the shapes intersect, the 12 colors of the wheel move back and forth out to the very edges.

Creating this design with fabric was a challenge. After experimenting with several piecing techniques, I used a large-scale foundation piecing method.

 

 

Giveaway *closed*

I'm sharing some of my goodies from QuiltCon with one of you. I'll draw one winner on March 24th at 1pm PST out of all entries on my five posts about my QuiltCon classes. (This is the third of the five posts.) The drawing is open to everyone. To enter, please comment below and tell me your favorite quilting book. Followers can get a second entry by posting a second comment to tell me how you follow me (Bloglovin', Instagram, etc.). Thank you! Thank you to everyone who entered. The winner is Anja of Anja Quilts!