A few yellow bits and pieces

The Rainbow Scrap Challenge color for April is yellow and gold. So I pulled out my scraps and made a few blocks. Here are the string blocks, sewn onto foundation fabric. 

And here they are with the photo edited to try to catch the true colors. I thought most of my yellow strings were sort of pale, but these turned out quite bright and saturated. It's been really hard to capture color correctly on my camera because the blue water reflects off every surface including our white boat ceilings. Even the underside of the clouds are turquoise here! 

I'm really happy with these scrappy stringy blocks and would have made a bunch more, but four seems to be about right for each color. I figure at the end of the year I'll have either 40, 44, or 48 blocks, depending on whether any of the monthly colors are neutrals. Any colors that seem to be missing can be stitched up later to fill in.

Two yellow backgrounds were put together from larger scraps, making the 12"x15" block for the wild cat appliques. Once again, I had to piece a smaller chunk of cat fabric for the vine/paisley print. I tried six ways from Sunday to make the seam match, but didn't have anywhere near close to a fabric repeat. It doesn't bother me too much because I think all the busyness of the quilt will mask a multitude of sins. And the photo is crooked because the wind kept trying to blow these into the water...see the lifted corner in the lower right? I let go just long enough to snap a pic, any pic!

My third RSC blocks, the spirals, aren't pieced yet. The design depends on fairly good contrast between the color and the background. Since I started with light neutrals for the backgrounds, that's a bit tricky. Do I switch to a darker background like gray for the yellow spirals? Or try to find my darkest gold scraps and select very very light neutral backgrounds? Cut pure white backgrounds just for these two blocks? Hm.

I also finished the flimsy from the blue fabric pull I showed last week. It turned out so well that I'm thinking about giving it as a gift. So now it's secret sewing and I can't show you. Sorry about that! I can tell you that I used Liz's Haphazard pattern, available for free. It's computer generated and each run is unique, which tickles my engineering soul. And if you don't follow Liz yet, go check out her blog and her amazing free motion quilting. She makes it look so easy...

We're thinking about moving on to Conception Island tomorrow. It's a very remote Bahamian National Park, so I don't think there will be any cell phone towers and connectivity there at all. There is a special species of endemic boa, though! I like snakes and hope we get a glimpse of one. Don't worry, they are only about 3 feet long and too skinny to squeeze humans. We'll be traveling with another boat and I'm looking forward to getting to know Steve and Barb and their (large, not boa snack sized) dog Molly a little better.