Hello everyone- happy Friday!

For rules and past week’s palettes and bundles, see my Color Play Friday page. 

Also, we now have a monthly Color Play Friday newsletter! In it, you will find a recap of the month’s bundles from Trina and me, updates from both Laurel, Poppy and Pine and In An Otter Life, and announcements about special upcoming events. We have something fun planned for this month, so you’re going to want to check it out!

I took this week’s photo last summer. I had been coming home to this poppy everyday for a while, but on this particular day, I just HAD to snap a photo.

I wanted to capture the feeling of that hot summer day with birds chirping and bees buzzing through the flowers. Those of you not from the PNW always hear about our rain, but we do actually have a dry spell in late summer-  last year especially. Let just say after last summer, I was happy to get rain and start seeing snow on our mountains again!

The toughest part of this week was finding a fabric with just the right shade of Tiffany blue. Everything I was finding was just a little ‘too blue’. I was thrilled to find the Tamara Kate print with just enough of a green tint to make me happy.

I was really happy this week to discover a new-to-me designer- Dena Fishbein of Dean Designs. Her Teja print was the perfect fabric this week to tie everything else together.

Here are the fabrics I used:

Ann Kelle, Remix in Summer

Bari J, Petals and Plume, Rumpled Sour

Tamara Kate, Nature Walk, Tall Grass

Dena Designs, Kumara Garden, Teja

Timeless Treasures, Pink Flamingo, Triangle Geo in Candy

Francis Newcombe, Cherie, Les-Points in Rose

A note about scale:

• While I believe scale is a very important part of fabric selection, the fabrics shown in my Color Play images are not always perfectly to scale. I do my best, by you should always double check scale before ordering!

Don’t forget to head over to the other blogs and see what they came up with! The fun of Color Play Friday is seeing the differences and similarities between everyone’s bundles.

Participants this week:

Laurel and Pine (that’s me!)

In An Otter Life

Quilting Mayhem

Sarah Goer Quilts

Quilty Dream

Shimmy and More

You can also head over to my Color Play Friday page to see my palettes and bundles from previous weeks.

Next week’s photo is one of Trina’s  called Minneapolis and can be found on our Pinterest page. 

Are you enjoying Color Play Friday? We’d love for you to get in on the fun and create your own Color Play post! You can create a bundle of fabric, select yarns or embroidery threads, or create a project inspired by our photo. Be sure to let Trina or I know so we can link up to you. You can get in contact with us at colorplayfriday@gmail.com

I hope you can join us next week!

Happy Sewing, ~L

As you know, this is a year of joining for me, and one of the things I signed up for this year is the Mighty Lucky Quilting Club. Each month, we have a different instructor who sends out a lesson and a challenge on the first of the month. We also get a mid-month check-in with encouragement, extra tips, and answers for questions they’ve received.

This months challenge was Minimalist Improvisation from Season Evans.

I didn’t get going on this challenge until halfway through the month, just because I was busy with other things. I don’t shy away from improv or a challenge, but I did have a hard time using no color and all solids. As you can see, I decided to make my focal fabric a print, although a very simple one.

Another strange part for me was cutting with my scissors instead of the ruler and rotary cutter. It made perfect, straight lines nearly impossible, but I guess that’s the point!

The impression I wanted to give on this one was of things being impossibly balanced and everything being just a bit off kilter. I put a lot of my own busy, stressed, ‘balancing my life’ emotions into this quilt, so I was glad to have it done.

I’ll be putting it away for a while until I can appreciate it for what it is and not think about what I wish I had done differently or better on it. I really do love the look of it, but the first time you try something new, you learn so much about making it better the next time around. That’s why I’m so glad I’m doing these challenges: to stretch and grow and try things that are just a bit out of my comfort zone.

Thank for stopping by, and happy sewing! ~L

Hi there! This week had been a productive one. Lots of sewing, and lots of planning for the future.   This weekend I’m watching two little girls for my friends who are at a conference.So if you need me, I’ll be painting nails and watching princess movies for the next 48 hours!

More about Color Play Friday:

Trina from In An Otter Life and I created Color Play Friday one day after a nice trip to the fabric store together.

Here are the rules:

1. Each week, Trina or I will select a picture from our joint Pinterest board. These are all pictures that one of us has taken on our adventures.
2. We each create a palette using colors from that picture
3. We then create a bundle of 5-8 fabrics that is inspired by that palette. They don’t have to be an exact match to our palette, and we can throw in contrasting or accent colors, but the bundle should look inspired by the palette.
4. We don’t see anyone else’s palette or bundle before we post on Friday.
5. That’s it! It’s going to be so fun to see what we each come up with.

Trina took this photo in New York while on a tour bus. I love all the taxis and the diagonal movement in the picture.

I am expecting a great-nephew this summer. So as soon as I started picking colors from this picture, I knew EXACTLY what I wanted to do. A super-fun, bright, little-boy bundle was what my heart needed this week!

In search of adorable fabric, I knew to go to the Riley Blake website first. Turns out, it’s the only place I needed to go this week. There is SO MUCH CUTE on their site, and it seems their ‘boy’ collections were made with this palette in mind.

Here are the fabrics I chose:

Simple Simon & Company, Four Corners, Triangles in Black

Lori Whitlock, Play Ball 2, Stars in Gray

Nadra Ridgeway, Bloom and Bliss, Stripe in Yellow

Bella Blvd, Rover, Paw in Orange

Riley Blake, Colorfully Creative, Crayola Color Me Alphabet in White (Coming June 2016)

Zoe Pearn, Lucky Star, Circle in Red

Natalie Lymer, Greatest Adventure,  Main in Navy

Lori Whitlock, Play Ball 2, Plaid in Navy

A note about scale:

• While I believe scale is a very important part of fabric selection, the fabrics shown in my Color Play images are not always perfectly to scale. I do my best, by you should always double check scale before ordering!

 

 

Don’t forget to head over to the other blogs and see what they came up with! The fun of Color Play Friday is seeing the differences and similarities between everyone’s bundles.

Participants this week:

Laurel and Pine (that’s me!)

In An Otter Life

Quilting Mayhem

Sarah Goer Quilts

Quilty Dream

Shimmy and More

Sew Not Perfect

You can also head over to my Color Play Friday page to see my palettes and bundles from previous weeks.

Here is the photo we’ll be using for next week. It can be found here.

Are you enjoying Color Play Friday? We’d love for you to get in on the fun and create your own Color Play post! You can create a bundle of fabric, select yarns or embroidery threads, or create a project inspired by our photo. Be sure to let Trina or I know so we can link up to you. You can get in contact with us at colorplayfriday@gmail.com

I hope you can join us next week!

Happy Sewing, ~L

As I mentioned last month, I am participating in the Bonfire Sampler Block of the Month swap with Quilting Mayhem and In an Otter Life.  Each month, we make three blocks and exchange them at the beginning of the next month.

As of the beginning of the month, I still had not found an orange I was happy with. I went to one of my local quilt shops a week ago , and I found a great option! It’s Oval Elements in Peaches ‘n Cream from Art Gallery Fabrics. I also used it for the Orange blocks I showed you on Monday.  I only got a half yard because I think I’m also going to find a slightly brighter orange to incorporate into my Bonfire blocks as well.

So, here are my blocks for the month!  I made last months blocks on the very cool end of the spectrum, so I wanted to balance these ones a little more. In the summer months, I may make some really warm-toned blocks to help balance out the cool blocks from January. It’s funny how the season effects what fabrics we choose.

It’ll be so interesting at the end of the year to see all 24 blocks made over 10 months by three different people. I can’t wait to see this quilt top, and it will be such a sweet reminder of my quilty friends.

Speaking of my quilty friends, be sure to check visit Trina and Mindy today to see their Button blocks.

Happy Sewing, ~L

I’m linking this post up to:

Happy Monday, friends!  I hope your week is starting well!

Just wanted to touch base really quickly and show you some of the blocks I was working on last week.

These blocks are for an exchange with my modern guild. A block design and color is chosen each month. You can sign up at the meeting to bring blocks for the following meeting.  This month, our color was orange. Orange is not one of ‘my colors’, but I’ve been stretching myself lately and just had to sign up. Plus, at this time of year in the Pacific Northwest, working with a bright, warm color cheers you up!

There are 11 members who signed up, so I did 11 blocks.  I’ll probably end up making one more for an even twelve once we do the exchange.  I did several variations- here are some of them:

 

I can’t wait for the next meeting to see what my guild mates came up with!

Happy Sewing, ~L

For this post, I’m linking up to:

How did a whole week get by again without me posting anything?! Time flies when you’re having fun, I guess. And I had a great time this last week!

First of all, I designed a fabric for the Spoonflower “Love is in the Air” challenge. As soon as I heard the theme, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. You can see the fabric I entered here, or go here to see winners from last week and to vote on this week’s contest.

I’m also working hard to finish up all the swap blocks I’ve committed to doing this month. I signed up for an orange block exchange at my last guild meeting, and it turned out that 10 other ladies signed up as well!  So, that was 11 blocks to sew. And today I need to finish up my Button blocks for the Sister Sampler Bonfire Swap.

Add to that Trina’s Woodland Postcard Swap and all my other WIPs, and you’ve got one busy sewist- good thing I love it!

More about Color Play Friday:

Trina from In An Otter Life and I created Color Play Friday one day after a nice trip to the fabric store together.

Here are the rules:

1. Each week, Trina or I will select a picture from our joint Pinterest board. These are all pictures that one of us has taken on our adventures.
2. We each create a palette using colors from that picture
3. We then create a bundle of 5-8 fabrics that is inspired by that palette. They don’t have to be an exact match to our palette, and we can throw in contrasting or accent colors, but the bundle should look inspired by the palette.
4. We don’t see anyone else’s palette or bundle before we post on Friday.
5. That’s it! It’s going to be so fun to see what we each come up with.

This sweet guy is named Skywalker. I met him when I was in Eastern Washington with my mom visiting her best friend and her best friend’s mother. We were picking apples and Skywalker (the neighbor horse) was the happy recipient of our rejects.  When I snapped this photo, he was trying to steal an apple from my hand- rotten boy!

This week, I decided to ignore the green grass and just focus on Skywalker’s amazing colors. Having a neutral palette that includes a lot of brown, my natural tendency would normally be towards a very masculine bundle. But instead I really wanted to capture the feeling from the weekend….. two mothers and two daughters drinking tea, picking apples and sitting on the back porch watching nothing in particular. As a result, I ended up with a very floral, feminine bundle.

Here are the fabrics I chose:

Lella Boutique, Into the Woods, Cozy Stitches in Dark Bark

Elizabeth Olwen, Morning Song, Lush Lullabye in Gray

Elizabeth Olwen, Park Life, Leafscape

Lizzy House, Mini Pearl Bracelets 

Robert Kaufman, Whisper Prints, Leaf White

Hawthorne Threads, Norwegian Wood, Wallflowers in Onyx

 

A note about scale:

• While I believe scale is a very important part of fabric selection, the fabrics shown in my Color Play images are not always perfectly to scale. I do my best, by you should always double check scale before ordering!

Don’t forget to head over to the other blogs and see what they came up with! The fun of Color Play Friday is seeing the differences and similarities between everyone’s bundles.

Participants this week:

Laurel and Pine (that’s me!)

In An Otter Life

Quilting Mayhem

Sarah Goer Quilts

Quilty Dream

Shimmy and More

Sew Not Perfect

You can also head over to my Color Play Friday page to see my palettes and bundles from previous weeks.

Here is our photo for next week, simply titled NYC. You can find it here.

Are you enjoying Color Play Friday? We’d love for you to get in on the fun and create your own Color Play post! You can create a bundle of fabric, select yarns or embroidery threads, or create a project inspired by our photo. Be sure to let Trina or I know so we can link up to you. You can get in contact with me via email, or by tagging me on Instagram.  

I hope you can join us next week!

Happy Sewing, ~L

Hi quilty friends! Happy Friday- I hope your week was amazing.

More about Color Play Friday:

Trina from In An Otter Life and I created Color Play Friday one day after a nice trip to the fabric store together.

Here are the rules:

1. Each week, Trina or I will select a picture from our joint Pinterest board. These are all pictures that one of us has taken on our adventures.
2. We each create a palette using colors from that picture
3. We then create a bundle of 5-8 fabrics that is inspired by that palette. They don’t have to be an exact match to our palette, and we can throw in contrasting or accent colors, but the bundle should look inspired by the palette.
4. We don’t see anyone else’s palette or bundle before we post on Friday.
5. That’s it! It’s going to be so fun to see what we each come up with.

 

This week’s photo was taken by Trina at the annual Tulip Festival held in Skagit County, Washington. It’s quite a sight to see!

This week was tough for me; there was just a little too much to work with. I ended up having to ignore all that gorgeous blue in the sky so that I could really focus on the parts that jumped out at me- the pathway, the tulips, and the mountains.

Here are the fabrics I ended up with:

Cotton and Steel Basics, Dottie in Cloud

Jessica Jones, Typography, Script in Khaki

Anna Maria Horner, True Colors,  Medallion in Emerald

MaKower UK, The Henley Studio, Asami, Mini Square in Teal

Art Gallery Fabrics, Oval Elements in Eggplant

Anna Maria Horner, Dowry, Cracking Codes in Eggplant

A note about scale:

• While I believe scale is a very important part of fabric selection, the fabrics shown in my Color Play images are not always perfectly to scale. I do my best, by you should always double check scale before ordering!

Don’t forget to head over to the other blogs and see what they came up with! The fun of Color Play Friday is seeing the differences and similarities between everyone’s bundles.

Participants this week:

Laurel and Pine (that’s me!)

In An Otter Life

Quilting Mayhem

Sarah Goer Quilts

Shimmy and More

Sew Not Perfect

 

You can also head over to my Color Play Friday page to see my palettes and bundles from previous weeks.

Here is next week’s photo, titled Skywalker. It can be found here. 

Are you enjoying Color Play Friday? We’d love for you to get in on the fun and create your own Color Play post! You can create a bundle of fabric, select yarns or embroidery threads, or create a project inspired by our photo. Be sure to let Trina or I know so we can link up to you. You can get in contact with me via email, or by tagging me on Instagram.  

I hope you can join us!

Happy Sewing, ~L

This is a year of joining for me, and one of the fun things I’ve joined is the Modern Half-Square Triangle Quilt Along at Blossom Heart Quilts.

Every couple of weeks, Alyce is sending out a new block. These blocks are chosen with a goal in mind: becoming masters of the half-square triangle. It’s a great quilt along for beginners, because we’re starting out with some easier blocks. I am enjoying the process so far, but I’m really looking forward to getting into some really complicated blocks as we go along!

Doing this quilt along is nice because it’s feeling very manageable- just one block every couple of weeks.

Here are my blocks so far:

Candy

 

 

Ninja

(I made two of these to vary the color on each block. The original called for only one print fabric)

Lantern

One quick tip:

For blocks that I know are going to sit around for a while before being set into a quilt, I like to do a quick little back and forth stitch along each of the outside seams. This keeps the seams from coming loose in between making the block and setting it.  Make sure you stay well within the seam allowance so the stitches don’t show once it’s set.

 

 

 

Several months ago, Daisy from Ants to Sugar posted posted a picture on Instagram of some Tula Pink pieced units and kindly offered to send them out to whoever claimed them first. I was the lucky first commenter, and about a week later, I had those beauties in my mailbox. Daisy had combined the Tula pieces with several different solids, but I really wanted to see them paired with just one solid, so I went about the work of deconstructing the units. I still have some of the pieced units in a different colorway that I will probably keep together and use on another project.

The Tula pieces I ended up with were 2.5″ wide. I knew I wanted to do some sort of offset stacked coins pattern, and was just sort of waiting for inspiration to hit as to what background color I should use.  Then, lo and behold, one afternoon while rummaging through my scraps from my husband’s quilt, I found a stack of Kona charcoal pieces that also happened to be 2.5′ wide.

Serendipity!  A perfectly free quilt top!

If you follow me on Instagram, you probably saw that I originally had this quilt in alternating stacks of blue and pink. Once I got it on the design wall, it just wasn’t sitting right with me, so I left it up for the night. When I got up in the morning, I did some moving around and ended up with this design. If you look closely, you may notice that the left side of the quilt is more pink and the right side is more blue. I hope to do this with solids sometime soon so I can really see the effect of the blending colors.

Because I REALLY offset the ‘coins’ of this quilt, I’ve decided instead to call this the Crankshaft quilt. Once I got it done and back up on the wall, that’s exactly what it looked like to me. Pretty, floral crankshafts! Do you suppose I could get one of those for my car?

I had a Periscope viewer ask about a pattern, so I’ll be writing one for this very soon to put on my brand new Patterns page. It is my intention to eventually have several free quilt patterns for you there.

This week, I’m linking up to:

Happy Sewing!  ~L

 

Happy Friday, friends! I hope everyone had a wonderful week. Being the first week of the month, this Wednesday was the day that both my guilds had their meetings. I’ve been unable to attend the Modern Quilt Guild meetings because they conflict with my teaching at church, but I was able to change things around a bit and now I can go to both guild’s meetings!

At my morning guild, we got to hear all about silk from the super-talented JB Scharf. I started the presentation with absolutely no interest in working with silk and by the end I was planning my first thrift shop, silk-buying trip. I’d say that’s a job well done on her part!

In the evening, I headed over to Quilting Mayhem for the meeting of the Snohomish MQG. I had attended one planning meeting before we became an official guild, but this was technically my first meeting. We spent some time doing a little planning for the future and then got to see some amazing show-and-tells. It was fun to see some projects up close and personal that I had been admiring on Instagram. It’s REALLY fun when you realize that someone you’re a fan of is in your guild and you can mentally connect the actual person with their work!

Having two guild meetings in one day sure does get my imagination going on all sorts of potential projects!

More about Color Play Friday:

Trina from In An Otter Life and I created Color Play Friday one day after a nice trip to the fabric store together.

Here are the rules:

1. Each week, Trina or I will select a picture from our joint Pinterest board. These are all pictures that one of us has taken on our adventures.
2. We each create a palette using colors from that picture
3. We then create a bundle of 5-8 fabrics that is inspired by that palette. They don’t have to be an exact match to our palette, and we can throw in contrasting or accent colors, but the bundle should look inspired by the palette.
4. We don’t see anyone else’s palette or bundle before we post on Friday.
5. That’s it! It’s going to be so fun to see what we each come up with.

This week’s photo was taken at a friend’s wedding a couple of summers ago in my beautiful hometown. Hydrangeas were my wedding flower, so I had to snap a shot of these.

I knew that my palette this week was really going to focus on purple. There are so many options in hydrangea flowers for different shades and tones of purple, so I had a lot to work with. Then as soon as I pulled out that green from the leaves, I was in love with this whole thing! I wanted fabrics for my bundle that were child-like and whimsical.

Here’s what I chose:

 

Timeless Treasures, Sketch Basic in Lavender

Alisse Couter, Make a Wish, Rosette in Lilac

Tula Pink, Elizabeth, Tent Stripe in Plum

Lizzy House, The Lovely Hunt, Unicorn Tapestry in Purple

Jeni Baker, Dreamin’ Vintage, Sweet Meadow in Orchid

Kaffe Fasset, Shot Cotton, Sprout

 

A note about scale:

• While I believe scale is a very important part of fabric selection, the fabrics shown in my Color Play images are not always perfectly to scale. I do my best, by you should always double check scale before ordering!

Don’t forget to head over to the other blogs and see what they came up with! The fun of Color Play Friday is seeing the differences and similarities between everyone’s bundles.

Participants this week:

Laurel and Pine (that’s me!)

In An Otter Life

Quilting Mayhem

Sarah Goer Quilts

Shimmy and More

Sew Not Perfect

You can also head over to my Color Play Friday page to see my palettes and bundles from previous weeks.

Here is our photo for next week.

Are you enjoying Color Play Friday? We’d love for you to get in on the fun and create your own Color Play post! You can create a bundle of fabric, select yarns or embroidery threads, or create a project inspired by our photo. Be sure to let Trina or I know so we can link up to you. You can get in contact with me via email, or by tagging me on Instagram.  

I hope you can join us next week!

Happy Sewing, ~L