RSC17 week 17

TWO TOPS DONE

TOP ONE:  I finished piecing my Summer quilt and showed it at the Monona Quilters meeting on Monday.  Some of the folks there had never seen a Kaffe Fassett quilt before.  It is 82 X 90 inches, so the entire top could not be in the photo, but everyone got an eyeful.

On Tuesday my friend Sue came over to pick it up and help me choose a quilting design.  I chose one with open circular swirls including some leaves and feathers.  The backing is light blue and white, so that should show the quilting very well. It should be finished by the end of May.  

TOP TWO:  I had some free time this week and wanted to work on a UFO.  I found my RSC16 16-patch blocks, which had been pieced with some added blocks to make 16.  That was last November.  But it was too small for a small child quilt. It needed 6 inches added all around to make it about 44 inches square.  

When I dug into the hidden areas of my stash I discovered a fleece blanket and some coordinating fabric. Monkeys and bananas, a combination only a child or a quilter could love.

There was enough fabric to do four side pieces of 6 inches, but not the corners.  What better corners than some 9-patch blocks! I whipped the whole thing together in no time.

Wow!  Another super bright flimsy waiting to be backed and finished for Project Linus.  I was even in time on Thursday to link up a post with Ad Hoc Improv Quilts for Kaya at Sew Slowly.  It really was improvised, not at all planned ahead.  

I hope you all had a good stitching week and know that this month of multicolored fabrics was a fun 

learning experience, as it was for me.  Thank you, Angela.

See what all the colorful scrappy fun is about this week at 

Rainbow Scrap Challenge at

   soscrappy  and

Oh, Scrap! at 

Quilting Is More Fun Than Housework

AIHC Challenge, April 27

AN EVOLVING IMPROV PROJECT

I started the Rainbow Scrap Challenge for 2016 by making, among other things, a 16-patch block using the colors of the month supplied by Angela at soscrappy.  They were a mix of two colors each month, such as pink and brown, purple and blue.  I had no thought for any use of them when they were done.  

These were the first four blocks through April, 2016.  My only goal was to make them as colorful and playful as I could.

By August I had nine blocks, nice but not enough to use by themselves.

The tenth color was black and neutrals, which I chose to skip.  Instead, in October I decided to make more muticolored blocks and ended up with these.

I certainly had lots of color but no purpose in mind.  So they just got stuck down in a pile of UFOs untiil last week.  I had some free time and, while browsing through my stash, I found this fleece blanket with monkeys and bananas.  It was designated for a Project Linus quilt backing and at one point I had bought some banana fabric to go with it.   How many people buy banana fabric?  Only us crazy quilters.  

I only needed to add about 6 inches all around to make a little child quilt.  What better than monkeys and bananas?  The finishing touch was the 9-patch corner blocks and one flimsy finished this morning.

Is it colorful enough?  I really love it, an improv to donate to Project Linus on May 8.   In fact, I guess it also counts toward AHIQ goal two because it has two different sizes of blocks  However, I already have some blocks in mind for that goal, so just count it as an extra improv and a UFO finish.

Thanks, Kaya and Ann, for running this challenge.  I'll be back next month for sure.  Come check out the Ad Hoc Improv Quilts doings at  Kaya's blog,  Sew Slowly, or Ann's blog, Fret Not Yourself. 

RSC17 week 16

HIDDEN HOUSES

This week I've spent nearly all my time piecing my Summer KF quilt.  I plan to show it at our Monona Quilters group on Monday.  It will still need the outer red border at that point, but I can't wait for my friends to see it.  You folks online saw the whole layout last week, but they have only seen two blocks.  

So, in checking off  monthly list of projects and blocks, I found I needed to make two multicolored houses for the month's RSC17 part.  It took very little time to make them.  

I was really happy to find the sweet kitten for the yellow house.  She seems to be growing an avocado tree from seed in the little pot.

Then I decided to pull out the rest of the houses and, instead of eight, there were ten of them!  I see that two others are multis, so I must have made them at the beginning of April and forgot to take pics before putting them in my pile.   So here are the ten done so far.

The blue and pink house and the wild striped one are the two extra multis.  It's the first time I've gotten ahead rather than behind in my blocks.  I think it will probably be a onetime event.

Here is another multi I made back in 1980.  We moved from California to Sopkane  WA two years before, but Roger lost his job there and found work in the Seattlle area, 300 miles away.  I wanted to make a memory quilt of our stay there.  I asked my little quilt group for advice and, with their generous help in piecing the squares, I got all of our friends signatures on the throw quilt. But the border did not work out.  It was only  my second quilt and I did not know how to measure the width across the middle, etc.  When I hand quilted the first side it was very wavy, a disaster.  I never did finish it until last year, when I just cut the border off and made a wraparound binding with the backing.  So now Sarah has a nice snuggle quilt with many of our memories.

I used fabrics from Beth's clothing and other calicoes, real 1970's style.  But it has not aged a bit, a forgotten piece of our past with a new life.

I hope all of you are making good progress toward your goals, whether a few or many.  Each finish is something to celebrate and we all celebrate with you.

Wishing all of you a lovely springtime.

See what all the colorful scrappy fun is about this week at 

Rainbow Scrap Challenge at

   soscrappy  and

Oh, Scrap! at 

Quilting Is More Fun Than Housework

RSC17 week 15

A COLORFUL WEEK

Lots going on this week and good news!  I saw the first flowers in our garden today, hyacinths of different colors, lovely and sweet smelling.  It's about time. 

I did not accomplish much stitching this week, but did get my Folded Box for April done.  I was not sure I would get the 3-D effect using three colors of multicolored fabric.  The darkest is a lovely forest green with tiny colored blossoms, but it looks black in the photo.  I'm not showing the first photo which had one of the geese blocks headed the wrong way.  Late night ripping and repairing was needed.

The really special highlight of my week was Thursday evening, when Beth and Sarah came to help lay out my 30 Kaffe Fassett blocks.  Sarah did the crawling on the floor and Beth took the excellent photos.  I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE IT !

Since each block is 16 inches and there is an  additional outer border of a gorgeous red print to add, it comes to about 80 X 96 inches.  Today I started by piecing two rows, checking them against the photo to be sure of the pleacement.  Can't wait to get it to my friend to have it quilted.  

TO ALL MY DEAR BLOGGER FRIENDS,

Thanks once again for your friendship, which means so much to me.

Wishing all of you a lovely springtime.

See what all the colorful scrappy fun is about this week at 

Rainbow Scrap Challenge at

   soscrappy  and

Oh, Scrap! at 

Quilting Is More Fun Than Housework

RSC17 week 14

MULTICOLOR FUN AND CHALLENGE

What a change this month.  It's not as simple as I thought to work out a good piece using multicolored fabrics.  First of all, I can't do a crayon this month.  All the wax colors would mush together into muddy brown, not very exciting.  

My project for this week was two Geese Migration blocks.  But how do you make them noticeably different?  My solution was grouping them by dark and strong versus lighter and paler.  The starting point was a dark midnight blue with dull gold dots.  That made the sky for the first group of geese, and strong, bright color mixes were easy to find.

As you can see, within that range I was able to grade the geese from light to dark.

The daylight block was trickier.  I finally chose a sandy beach fabric for the triangles.  Apparently the geese decided to take a break and relax in the sun.  Here the squares are softer also.

I had a busy week otherwise, so all that I got done was my Summer quilt blocks 21 and 22.  It's getting more difficult to find combinations I haven't used before.  That's where photo records come in handy.  But Kaffe Fassett hasn't let me down yet.  

We still have very few flowers in bloom, so I'm happy to be working with all these fun multis.  Can't wait to see what all of you have come up with this week.

Wishing all of you a lovely springtime.

See what all the colorful scrappy fun is about this week at 

Rainbow Scrap Challenge at

   soscrappy  and

Oh, Scrap! at 

Quilting Is More Fun Than Housework