Tag Archives: Kona Azalea

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In August, Emily pointed us to Bow Bridge in Central Park at spring sunny day by Helen Denisevich for our color inspiration. She asked us to choose two color groupings inspired by the vibrant colors in the watercolor and ink painting. She wanted a 12" x 12" block with a small section of one color group surrounded by the second color group. Any improv we'd like!

I loved the greens in the painting, ranging from yellow-greens into blue-greens, so I pulled fabric for that to be one of my groupings. Then I focused on the pinks in the tree and chose a variety of pinks, light to dark.

My finished block is approximately 12" x 12". The pink section in the center was informed by the shape of my scraps, starting with the largest triangle in the center.

The green section to the left of my center section was informed by scraps that were wedge shaped.

I pieced green strips for the top section, but when that was too boring for me I made a couple vertical slices to insert additional pieced sections.

I love having beautiful, saturated bold colors in a prompt. And the freedom to do any improv pieced we'd like meant that I could just play with the fabric. It was such a joy to create.

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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