Red&White Back&Forth

 

I'll post more details about this later, but in the interest of easing up on the perfectionism, I wanted to get it up on the web, so I can link to it from the Patchwork Times Monochromatic Challenge.

Design Wall Monday - Vanilla Tangerine Twinkler

Just have to sew the 4 columns together, and then the center will be done. Still thinking about whether to have a border, and if so, what kind.

Check out what other folks are working on at Patchwork Times.

Recent Finishes - Sepia Shadows

 

I've been doing more quilting than blogging lately, so I'm playing catch-up with some of my recently finished(!) projects. First up is a minature that I did for the March Patchwork Times Monochromatic Challenge. It was finished in March, but I never quite got around to posting it until now. (Recovering Procrastinator?)

Stats: 8.25" x 8.25" finished, using cotton quilting fabric. "Batting" was some felt scraps that I had lying around. Paper pieced using Terrie Sandelin's technique & machine quilted. I've already sent it off to The Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative (AAQI), where hopefully it will find a good home and raise some money for an extremely worthy cause.

Reflections

• Brown is really my least favorite color, especially when it's all by itself. I like it well enough as a neutral with other shades, especially pink, purple, or red, but by itself? Not so much. One of the points of the challenge is to open our minds to new palettes, but my mind still hasn't changed on this.
• Trip Around the World/Sunshine and Shadows is my all-time favorite quilt pattern, especially when done with gradient shading. I have another miniature that I made in colors I actually like that still needs to be finished up, and I have many, many more that I've designed that I plan to move forward on making.
• Felt actually makes a great batting for a small wall quilt. It has enough "fluff" so that it shows the texture of the quilting, but the extra stiffness adds to the "hangability" of the finished quilt. I wouldn't use it on a bed quilt -- much too stiff for that. Might not be bad for a pillow, though.
• I used dark brown thread for the quilting mostly because I had it. ;) I do wish I'd used a lighter brown, or even a beige. I'm not sorry I quilted as heavily as I did for texture, but using all that dark thread made the overall effect too dark.

So, that's #1 on the list of recent finishes. Stay tuned for more!

Modern doesn't have to mean Wonky

Check out these amazing quilts by Kay Koeper Sorensen.

Quilts + Color: Quilts Radiating From The Center

Scrappy Saturday - Disappearing 16 Patch

(True Confession time: I actually did these last Sunday. But it was a weekend. And it's Saturday now. And they're purple. And scrappy.)

Anyway, I had a bunch of violet scraps left over from the February Monochromatic Challenge over at Patchwork Times (pieces cut out and waiting in a shoebox for me to get back to them), and I liked the idea of the Disappearing 16 Patch, so I cut out a bunch of 4½" squares, combined them with some Robert Kaufman Kona Solids charms, and got this:

which I then cut up, and got this (more or less):

 

You're supposed to sew them together like that, so that would be your new block, but I'm thinking of using them as HSTs, either in conjunction with another color, or maybe with white, e.g.,


Reflections

• Press open vs. press closed – I made 2 16-patches, and pressed the seams on first closed, then open on the second block. The "open" block did lie flatter when it was done, but it was MUCH easier to match the corners on the rows by nesting the closed seams. I think I'll stick with closed, in general, for now.
• Looking at the finished blocks, I think I would have liked more prints and fewer solids. It would have made it feel "scrappier", I think, and the patch size is large enough so that it's nice to have a pattern to look at.

Grandma's Trellis Pillow - pt. 1

 

So, for my very first FNSI, I made these not-so-terribly exciting 9-patch setting blocks. I wish I had something more "oooh-worthy" to show off, but I did feel like I needed to do these first, given my problems with scant quarter-inch seams. The "ooh" blocks come next though, so there should be some prettier pictures in the next day or so.

I did get to use up a bunch of scraps at least. Some of the blocks were strip-pieced, but a lot of them were just made out of scraps that I trimmed to 2"x2" and then sewed together, kickin' it old-style.

Click on the link below to see what other folks got up to for their Fridays!

To heck with my taxes, I'm gonna quilt!

UPDATE: See Grandma's Trellis Pillow - pt. 1 for my results!