Tampa, FL

As a break from quilting Bright Bento, today I've been working on Charming Cupcakes. This little quilt for Project Linus is mostly scrappy, simple 5" patchwork squares. 

I recently purchased Angela Walter's book Shape by Shape. It's full of ideas for filling various geometric shapes: squares, rectangles, triangles and hexagons. I modified a couple of the designs to fill the heart shapes I was working on last week. I thought the charm squares would be a great way to try out a bunch more motifs, and decided to quilt each fabric a different way. There are about six to eight squares of each fabric.

This turquoise one has a "spiraling in" square pattern that I really like. I'll definitely do this one again. The only drawback is that it ends in the middle, so you have to break thread to move on to another area; there's no way to travel except back along the entire spiral.

This one has lines radiating out from one corner. It was easy and requires no marking. The pattern ends not in the original corner, but in the ditch in the middle of one of the opposite sides, so good for moving to the next square.

This one is hard to see because of the very low contrast between the dark blue block and the navy thread. That's a good thing, though, because it was a tricky shape for me. I had to mark some guidelines. It's basically a diamond shape inside the square, with loopy curves in each corner.  It starts and stops in the same place. While my loopies improved a little each time (especially after I started working counter clockwise around the diamond), they were never consistent within each block. Meh.

Here's that same motif from the back of the quilt. Yes, those are the backs of circus animals wearing jackets. I scored six yards of that fabric for about $15 on eBay! It makes great backing fabric for Project Linus quilts. The official name of the print is "Animal Tails," but Sean and I both call it "Guess What? Animal Butt!" and giggle because we are highly mature.

The last set of squares I worked on today are these busy turquoise medallion bursts. The quilt motif is super hard to see on this one, too.

A bit easier to make out on the back. The design divides the block into four equal squares and fills in two opposite ones with a tight back and forth wiggle. Because it was so hard to see on the front, at first I really hated this one. But after four or five repeats it started to grow on me and I got into a nice rhythm. I'm going to try it again on a plainer block, maybe a bright yellow one. With a little thinking ahead, it can be sewn to start and end pretty much anywhere in the block.