Scrappy play

I've been working on a couple of scrappy projects lately. One is the Hillside Houses Quilt Along from Pretty Little Quilts. Except, you know, it ended in 2015 so I'm a little late to the game and not really quilting "along." More like "quilting after." I've sewn up the entire top and it's ginormous for me: 60"x75". That makes it really hard to even take a photo since it's windy and cold outside and there's no place inside where I can spread it out and also get far enough away to take a pic. So. No further documentation on that for now. Stay tuned!

I made three blocks for the January/February block drive for Covered in Love. These are faded quarter log cabins. Kat asked for cool colors, and the blocks use 3.5" scraps. I have tons and tons of cool scraps, but I usually cut mine to 2.5" and 1.5" strips, so I was only able to squeak out three blocks. I hope the green one is cool enough...my lightest pieces for the cabin center are fairly yellow.

Another idea that's been percolating in my head is a triangle quilt made from striped fabric. I've seen quite a few interesting square HST blocks made with stripes, but not too many 60 degree triangles, probably because it requires sewing the dreaded Y-seams. There's so much online fear and loathing of Y-seams that I haven't tried to tackle them, but the time seems ripe. I found this Kaye Woods video tutorial, watched it twice, and took the plunge. It was actually kind of fun! 

The two triangles in the photo are about 5" tall, and made from the same piece of striped fabric. I didn't like the fabric, so it was great for experimenting. However, I love how the triangles turned out, but I ran out of this OOP fabric, darn it! Oh well, time to experiment with a few other stripes in my stash.

Lots of quilting folks are playing along with the Rainbow Scrap Challenge over at So Scrappy. Angela announces the color around the first of each month and everyone sews their own projects using that color. I'm not participating, but it's fun to read about. January's color is purple. Between digging through my scraps for cool colors for Kat, and seeing so much purple on other blogs, I caught the purple bug. (It's so much nicer than the sniffly, sneezy, miserable bug I caught over Christmas!)

Ever since Claudia posted photos of her Chunky Churndash quilt on Instagram, I've been wanting to make a scrappy one myself. It's a Quiltville free pattern, and uses lots of 2.5" and 1.5" pieces. These are my first few blocks, all from my purple scraps. The winter lighting is odd and makes them look quite blue in this photo, but they are most definitely purple. Eventually there will also be hourglass blocks, which make these little pieces look like they are on point. I'll probably do primarily cool color blocks rather than a rainbow.

We are currently in Madisonville, LA (Hi, Linda! I responded to your comment about living in Mandeville, but you're a no-reply commenter so I'm not sure if you saw it.) There's a really good pizza joint here and last night I saw this little painting of abstract sailboats on the wall of the restaurant. I thought this would make a fun quilt. I guess I have rainbows on the brain right now! What caught my eye was how the ripply "reflections" were so simply portrayed by streaking white through the colors. That would be fairly easy to do with fabric, too.