Finding inspiration online

I've been working on several different projects this week, all of which were inspired by things I found online.

Kystal at Let's Quilt Something posts quite a number of nice, free patterns, and I downloaded one called "Falling Petals" a couple months ago. It seems to be removed from her site now, but this is a screen shot of the cover illustration. I just love leaf shapes!

I had a jelly roll of Autumn Splendor by Barb Tourtillotte for Clothworks that I thought would look quite nice in this pattern. I decided to modify it a bit and make the corners curved instead of 45 degree cuts. So I started sewing strip sets together. Unfortunately, the pattern requires the strips to be at least 42" long, and my roll was at least a half inch short. Odd, and frustrating! Instead of being able to get four 10.5" cuts per strip, I had to trim everything down to 10 inches. Not a big problem, but I was flustered enough that I didn't pay attention to which corners I was lopping off. The pattern really calls for the upper right and lower left corners to be cut, when oriented with the strips running horizontally. I did mine randomly and so I wasn't able to get the nice alternating block design in Krystal's drawing.



While I'm quite happy with the individual curvy cornered leaf shapes, I just couldn't find a layout that looked right. I do love the rich autumnal colors of this line. But for now, I'm putting these blocks away to ferment.

Next, I pulled out a pretty panel by Chong A Hwang, who designs for Timeless Treasures fabrics. The panel and its coordinating line are called "Marbella," and feature lush florals and birds in black, turquoise and purple with metallic gold accents. Very rich!

My inspiration is this design that I found on Pinterest ages ago. I have no idea what the sizes are on the original design, but my goal was to use up most of my Marbella fat quarters, so the proportions are slightly different. If you would like to purchase the actual pattern, you can find it here on Shibori Dragon.

All the Marbella pieces had black backgrounds. So to add some contrast, I used some gold metallic for the panel "frame," and tonal turquoise and purple blenders for the background and central border. The way this is pieced, with long skinny rectangles around the outside of the panel, is like adding many borders, so it was good practice in keeping everything square so the edges didn't "grow" and get wavy.

Finally, I saw some cute scrappy butterflies on Cathy's Sane, Crazy, Crumby Quilting blog yesterday and immediately had a Squirrel! moment. Gotta make some right now! Cathy's butterfly wings require two sizes of HSTs and I had HSTs from the Astrodelic quilt last week, plus slightly larger HST scraps from some older project kicking around.  And the colors coordinated...perfect! Eight fun little flutterbies. I have no idea where these little fellas will land, but I'll add sashing to square them up when they find their forever quilty home.