Tag Archives: challenge quilt

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This week our challenge was to take inspiration from the colors of the sky, but exclude or use less than 10% of the usual blue. When I saw the prompt, my first thought was sunset colors. I ended up looking through my sunset photos and chose one from a recent trip to LA where I hung out with my friend Courtney while we walked around Manhattan Beach.

I pulled yellow and orange fabrics and the pile sat on my ironing board for days. I didn’t really have a plan. And I am teaching four days this week so I was kind of busy. This morning I taught the first half of Building an Improv Toolbox, my favorite workshop, and one of the last things we did in class was improv blocks with lines radiating from the corners. I teach tomorrow morning so I knew that if I was going to make something for Project QUILTING this week it had to be today. I decided I would use this improv technique. I really wanted to make a composition that had numerous blocks in it, but I knew that I did not have the time for piecing and quilting and binding a larger project so I went super simple. My mini quilt is one improv quilt block, trimmed to about 7“ x 8“ quilted with batting and then pillowcase bound with a piece of backing fabric. It went together pretty quickly, except for the hand stitching to close the top edge.

There were over 225 participants for the first challenge and at the time I'm writing this there are over 150 submissions this week. Click on over and take a look.

Thanks for visiting! I'm linking up on Kim's blog for the Project QUILTING Sky Colors challenge. Congratulations to everyone else who participated in the challenge this week. Next challenge drops on February 4th.

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I'm so excited for season 15 of Project QUILTING to be underway.

I pieced my improv bird house and then pivoted to people houses for my improv piecing demo at Northern California Quilt Council this past week. Here's what my design wall looked like last weekend.

I cut out nine more houses during my demos that are stacked up waiting to be sewn. I'm excited to get those together and watch the neighborhood on my design wall grow. I finished my bird house into a mini quilt by adding a fused appliqué circle and free motion quilting.

My quilt is approximately 9" x 8" and is finished with a faced binding. Since I didn't have a bird on the front I chose an Alison Glass print with birds and bees for the back.

Thanks for visiting! I'm linking up on Kim's blog for the Project QUILTING Bird House challenge. Congratulations to everyone else who participated in the challenge this week. Next challenge drops on January 21st.

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Another late night Saturday start for this week's Project QUILTING challenge, A Novel Project. 67 minutes from fabric pull to finished mini mini quilt this evening. Woo hoo!

At the beginning of the week I shared other quilts I have made that were inspired by books, but I had a hard time deciding what I wanted to make for the challenge. Earlier in the week, I scrolled through my Goodreads of what I've read in the last couple years and wasn't particularly motivated by what I have read recently.

I've been inspired by Margaret Fleisher's improv book cover blocks. See a few of them in this Instagram post and hear Margaret talk about her book cover project at about 6 minutes in to this video. You can also scroll back farther in her instagram feed to see the posts of each cover in 2020.

One of my basic tenets for Project QUILTING is to work small. While I admire those who make a baby quilt, lap quilt, or larger, in a week, I know that my schedule and bandwidth do not allow for that. I usually aim for 16" square or smaller. And the later in the week I get started, the smaller my quilts tend to be. This week was emotionally and physically challenging, and while I considered options and looked for inspiration numerous times, nothing was grabbing me. This evening before I settled on my back up idea, I took one more scroll through the books I've read in the last couple years and this time the cover of 32 Yolks by Eric Ripert stood out. I really like the strong graphic nature of the cover. So I pulled some fabric and got to work.

While I could have done some improv curve piecing I wasn't in the mood for the potential fussiness of that avenue. And I really loved the frayed edge of my scrap of yellow fabric. This drove two decisions. (1) I would use fusible appliqué. And (2) my yolk wouldn't be a curve at all, instead using what I had with the frayed piece of yellow. I got out my MistyFuse and improv cut a piece of blue fabric for the lower right. (I cut this one twice before I had a shape I liked.) Then I picked at the curved edge to fray the edge of the blue fabric to complement my frayed yellow fabric. Next, I cut MistyFuse to fit my yellow and blue fabrics and appliquéd them in place. Note: the fusible was applied just inside the frayed edge so that element could be a little bit dimensional.

I used two cardstock mats to envision the trimmed composition, added minimal quilting along the inner edge of the yellow and blue fabrics, and trimmed it 1/4" larger in each direction than the finished quilt would be. Then I used my 1/4" food to topstitch 1/4" from the edge around the quilt twice, then I trimmed down to 1/8" beyond my topstitching.

My mini mini quilt, Just One Yolk, finished just under 3" x 4".

The back has my fusible "Sarah Goer Quilts" label.

And here's my finished quilt next to the cover. Thank you to Margaret for the inspiration!

Thanks for visiting! I'm linking up on Kim's blog for the Project QUILTING A Novel Project challenge.

As a longtime participant of Project QUILTING, I'm excited to be a sponsor this year. Each week as a Weekly Sponsor I have contributed a PDF pattern to one winner. I'm also a Grand Prize Sponsor. The prize is a spot in one of my self-hosted open enrollment live virtual workshops.