Kaleidoscope flimsy

Before I hopped on an airplane to California, I was able to get all my kaleidoscope blocks pieced together. I do love how all those triangles somehow magically become interlocking circles!

During the flimsy piecing, I found I was constantly having to choose between flat seams and pointy points. I mostly chose flat seams and think that was the right way to go. Even with some of the points being wonky and cut off, the kaleidoscope effect works just fine. If you're close enough to admire the points, the circles disappear anyway. And there are some fine points in there, too, if you know just where to look, ha!

I tried to get a bit of a colorwash effect, although the values of the fabrics are pretty similar. So it's really just a pink to blue/warm to cool wash. That counts, right? Is temperaturewash a thing? This one will need some borders to fatten it up a bit. Maybe a soft, solid-reading baby blue. I'm looking forward to working more on this one when I return to the boat in a week or so.

In other news, perhaps you remember this block called "Grandad's Shirts" for one of Kat's block drives. The gorgeous, finished Covered in Love quilts are now posted on Kat's site. If you want to peek at them, check out Kat's latest post.

Quick Irma Update

The very tail end of Irma is just passing over us this evening, and all is well here. Thank you to everyone who expressed concern. Irma was only tropical storm force here in Charleston, and dumped a lot of rain and some storm surge. We saw winds of about 35 to 40mph for many hours, and gusts to 60mph. Our boat is very sturdy, though, and hardly moved. 

In between battening down the hatches, I was able to stitch up 48 kaleidoscope blocks using some Regent Street lawn fabrics and Kona Snow. The stack above still needs to be trimmed. That's the half with the background corners adjacent to the background blades.

This batch is trimmed and ready to go on the design wall (on the bed, actually, since I don't have any big walls to design on.) These are the opposite blocks, with the background corners adjacent to the patterned blades. 

I had a charm pack of the Regent Street, plus a bit of yardage. The charm pack had two of each design. I wanted to get two kaleidoscope blades out of each charm, so that dictated a smallish 7.5" block, but gave me a nice variety of fabrics, one per block. The rest of the blocks are from the yardage, but the effect should still be pretty scrappy.

Tomorrow I'm hoping to finish trimming the blocks and maybe get a start on sewing the flimsy. After that, I'll be away from my quilting for a week or so. I'm flying to California to visit my Mom and DH Sean will stay with the boat and the cat. I won't have much to post here, but I'll be visiting blogs and enjoying your work, hopefully!

(I just said to Sean, "I have 800 quilts in my head," and he immediately started singing, "You take one down, pass it around, 799 quilts in your head!" It cracked me up...)