Brightly Broken

So the title sounds morose, but this mini is anything but!  Using the tried and true Broken Herringbone tutorial by Anne at Play Crafts, I (temporarily) left the black and white behind in favor of rainbow blocks ala Molli Sparkles.  I chose pretty much all bright jewel tones of magenta, purple, green and blue and sashed them in white.  It was pretty fun to shop for fabrics in my stash and I loved creating a bit of an "I Spy" in each block.

I spy...some fruit and fowl.

I spy...Aladdin's castle and Belle's bicycle.

I spy...snips and shells.

All those straight herringbone lines needed a bit of softening up, so I quilted it in one continuous spiral from the center.

It got bound with some Comma in black.

So what's with the extra herringbone love when I've still got a top unfinished?  Well....I've been given the opportunity to teach a class featuring this block at the fabulous Quilter's Way in February and wanted to create a few extra samples to show just how versatile and different these blocks can be.  I'll be making a few more little pieces in the next month, but this is the sample that will hang in the shop to advertise the class.  Hopefully enough people will be inspired to sign up and make it happen - I can't wait to give it a try!

Linking up with:

Crazy Mom Quilts Finish It Up Friday

X Plus ScrapBeeLicious Equals Awesome...

Every quilting blog could use some good math puns, right?  No?  Guess it's just me then.  Alrighty...let me distract you from my lame jokes with some fabric goodness.

November's ScrapBeeLicious Queen was Alyce and she requested X Plus blocks with this Liberty print as our color inspiration:

Gorgeous, right?  Now a print like this makes me very, very aware of a big blind spot in my stash - prints.  Not to say that I have mostly solids, but about 95% of all my fabrics are monochromatic prints.  Not that this is usually a problem, but probably something that I should be more aware of when I fabric shop.  But I digress...

It's obviously not November anymore but thankfully (according to Wombat Quilt's very helpful Bee Etiquette post) I am not technically late yet!  This gave me a chance to scan our Flickr group and see what other bee members had already created.  I saw a lot of red centers so decided to mix things up a bit and use the mustard yellow along with Alyce's requested dark greys for the plus lines.

I got to sneak in one of my last few Birds & Bees scraps and a little 1001 Peeps too!

The X Plus block has been pretty popular lately and I've seen a lot of versions that are fantastic but this was my first attempt and it was a pretty fun block to make.  I can see how people can crank them out assembly line style!  

One thing that I am really glad I had read on Little & Lots' blog about her X Plus Quilt was how to use the large amount of triangle scraps that these blocks create.  She found a tip and turned the scraps from her X Plus into a WHOLE OTHER QUILT.  Love it!  So I followed suit and from just these two blocks, I now have a nice little pile of 16 pink and teal HSTs - I think they'll find their way into a small finish one way or another!

By the way, do any of you have blind spots in your stash or difficulty with prints like me?

Linking up:

Crazy Mom Quilts Finish It Up Friday

Little Bits Add Up...

I'm definitely sorry to say that I don't have another big reveal to share yet.  The Rangoon quilt top is still just shy of being complete, so I didn't end up meeting my self-imposed deadline of an October finish.  I guess I just got carried away with my black and white herringbones!  But since I finished that top, my week has been filled with a few little successes that have been on my to-do list for FAR too long.

I was simply buried under a pile of minky scraps from my cuddle blanket finishes in August and was trying to figure out if they were worth saving.  My oldest kept playing around with them and eventually asked me to make her a scarf with them.  "Sure - that's easy!" I said...and then promptly got around to it two months later.  Ah well - it's done now and checked off the list!  Of course, I still have enough minky scraps for at least 4 more scarfs, but all in good time.

The girls have been pretty interested in painting and crafting lately and our arts and crafts area is always the kitchen table.  Until this point, I had been using a fairly small scrap of laminated fabric that only covered about half the table but a trip with a friend up to Mardens gave me the excuse I needed to finally get off my butt and get some materials for a tutorial that I had seen in the August 2013 Parents magazine for a DIY tablecloth.  Laminated fabric is a mom's best friend - gorgeous fabric to decorate your table and you can clean up food messes, spilled and dried on paint, glue stick remnants and even markers with a simple swipe of a wet wipe.

Wait - did I say proper tablecloth?  How about this instead...I bought 2 yards of this beautiful cranberry Joel Dewberry oilcloth for $10 - that's right $10!! - and simply used my sewing scissors to cut curves around the fabric pattern, slapped it on the table and called it a day.  Check!

And that pesky pair of jeans that has needed a patch for a while now is finally fully dressed with a scrap of Salt Water that's a pretty good color match.  Check!

So not much showstopping stuff happening around here, but it feels awfully good to have so many little things done and off my list!  But speaking of a Showstopper - I saw this new pattern by Don't Call Me Betsy earlier this week and have been drooling over it ever since.  It looks like a lot of work, but certainly seems worth it to me!

Linking up:

Crazy Mom Quilts Finish it Up Friday!

Contrary and Indecisive...

Hey, hey...even though it's July already, the July block won't be released by Gen X Quilters until this Friday, so I'm all technically caught up with my Sisters' Ten blocks!  Chalk up another point for the procrastinators out there - we get it done.  Eventually.

But the June block - Contrary Wife - really gave me a headache.  The block pattern isn't my favorite which just made me want to drag my feet even more than usual.  Then once I finally made myself drag out all my fabrics, I was racked with indecision.  I forced myself to get one block done at a time, and I was actually pretty happy about my first one.  Everything about it was working together nicely and I was pleased.

Then it was time for number 2.  Again I went back and forth about fabrics - I'm trying to use all of the ones in my Salt Water stash fairly evenly and that includes a couple that I'm not as crazy about as others. I made some choices, but wasn't completed sold on them.  I wanted to use them more out of a need for fabric equality than love.  Paltry enthusiasm in fabric + slightly more enthusiasm in pattern = impending disaster.

It started out simple enough...not holding my ruler as steadily as I should have when cutting half-square triangles. A moment of distraction and loose grip and the whole thing slipped and cut right through the seam to render one side unusable.  Blerg.

Then indecision stumped me again on how to frame those center three squares in this second block.  I was using the blue octopus fabric and only had enough fabric for this one last block - should I do the same as block #1 with two octopus and one anchor?  Nope - I've already got 3 blue octopii out there and didn't want too much of the same thing.  The fabric that I had remaining only allowed for 2 options:  2 anchors/1 octopus OR 2 anchors/1 floral bush - fussy cutting always eats up more fabric than you anticipate.  No matter what I chose, this would be the last use of this fabric so there was no going back.  I hemmed and hawed and then went for the floral/anchor combination.  And immediately regretted it.  Double blerg.

It just didn't have the visual impact that I was hoping for.  Plus the green hexagon fabric leans toward the middle of the green-blue spectrum and it didn't stand out from the background as much as the aqua on block #1.  I got a little grumpy and didn't even want to do my planned picture of all 12 completed blocks together, so I threw them all back in the bin and will give it a fresh look another time.

Oh well - here's hoping for more joy in July's blocks.

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A Month Late and a Sand Dollar Short...

I'm finally starting to catch up on my Sisters' Ten Block Of the Month blocks - May is up first and hopefully the June blocks will get done next week!  May's block was Aunt Eliza's Star, which I really was looking forward to sewing before life left me running behind.

Of course the design would have finished up a lot quicker if I had just made it easy and made the hourglass portions of the star a single fabric like the pattern suggests.  I tried laying it out that way, but it just didn't seem like it was living up to it's Salty potential.

I really liked how my Lady of the Lake blocks finished with all of the three colorways working together and decided to pull that idea into the hourglass points instead.  I think that the extra fiddling and planning was worth it - I love how these came out!

Since the Lake blocks had a blue center, I switched up these to have the green seahorses fussy cut and center.

As I've gone on in this BOM, I'm starting to rethink my color scheme.  My original intention was to make each of the 2 monthly blocks in a specific colorway - one mainly green block and one mainly aqua block with splashes of the coral thrown in for accents.  But it seems like I'm drawn more to the completed blocks where I've done a fairly even mix of all three colors.  I might continue on this way and hopefully my early blocks will blend together alright.

Hey!  I got photobombed by a dragonfly!

Do you ever change course midway through a project?  Did it all come out alright in the end or did you have to go back and redo some work?

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Lady of the Salty Lake...

Well my goal for this month was to finish my Sisters' Ten blocks early in the month to avoid the scramble of the last week...oh well.  At least it's not the very, very last days of the month, right?  The block for April is Lady of the Lake and to be honest, I was not all that jazzed about this one.

All those half square triangles to mark, sew and press and the design just wasn't all that exciting to me (probably one of the reasons that I didn't jump all over it at the beginning of the month).  And yet...once I decided to vary the fabrics on the outer triangles and saw all of them coming together, I started to change my mind.

In fact, this just might be my favorite block that I've done so far.  So much so that I made two identical blocks.  How the heck did that happen?  The power of the Tula, I tell you.

I'm really liking how the group is coming together - I think that next month marks the halfway point for blocks. Yay!

Check out the flickr group for the Sisters' Ten BOM to see what everyone else is creating!

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Tula Pouch Testing and Giveaway Winner...

Thank you all so much for your suggestions for my charm packs!  I ended up loving quite a few ideas that were floated, so I'm sure that you'll be seeing some works in progress soon.  I wanted to give my giveaway post a chance to collect as many comments as possible but we're just about a week out and I don't want to keep you in suspense any longer!  Drum roll....

And here's the winning comment:

Congratulations This Dog's Mom - I will be emailing you shortly.  I never shared what the giveaway was for, so I hope that you're pleased with being my personal guinea pig for a new pattern that I picked up from michellepatterns.com for a keychain clutch featuring some of my favorite Tula Pink fabrics!  I ended up getting this pattern along with two others that I'm hoping to test drive before settling on one to "mass produce" as some teacher gifts during the month of May.

I'm not usually fantastic with patterns as I always manage to muck up some mundane detail or think that I know better than the pattern (ha ha) and end up skipping a critical construction point (which is why I will never, EVER attempt the infamous Weekender pattern).  So what did I manage to do with this super simple pattern?  Well for starters, I decided that my very first attempt (just couldn't wait until I had done it once and gotten the swing of it) would include the bonus point of trying to line up and fussy cut pattern pieces so that the front of the pouch would feature one Salt Water octopus.

 I did....okay I guess.  But the pouch's front flap looks slightly crooked to me and I can't tell if I cut the pattern piece crooked or just lined up the fabric a little off.  Either way...meh.  Plus I accidentally sewed the velcro a little further up than I should have, so it doesn't close as snugly as it should.  My last error was that I didn't leave quite enough room for turning the pouch right side out, so it got pretty crumpled and its so small that I couldn't press it perfect and crisp again.  Sigh.

I did a bit better with my second attempt using one of my last scraps from the Birds & the Bees line that I previously used on this project.

And even a little better on the last pass around using this aqua cut from the Prince Charming line.

I was also super excited that this was the first project I've finished that feature my custom made labels!  I wish I could tell you that these were specially made and ordered by a swanky online label company, but the truth is that I had a few sheets of the printable fabric leftover from my Bookworms quilt and I printed them out myself at home using Microsoft Word.  Whatever works, right?

So dear winner, I leave it to you - which would you like best?  Your wish is my command!  I'm also sending along a little fabric pack that I won at a guild meeting but isn't quite my taste.  Hopefully it will have a more useful home with you (or you can pass it along somewhere else and it will be the white elephant of fabric swaps!)

Linking up with: 

Crazy Mom Quilts - Finish it up Friday