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

This year, I made it a goal to start participating more in quilt-alongs, swaps and challenges. So when Trina from In An Otter Life asked me team up with her and Mindy from Quilting Mayhem for the Bonfire Block of the Month Sister Swap, I just couldn’t refuse. How fun to make and trade blocks with your quilty friends!

The Bonfire Quilt is a Block of the Month QAL from GenX Quilters and works out of the book Sister Sampler Quilts. The book includes setting instructions for three sampler quilts total, as well as lots of blocks. You don’t have to have a partner to participate; many people are making two sister blocks and keeping them both for their own quilts.

Here’s how we decided to run our swap: We each chose a color we wanted represented in our quilt. I chose teal, Trina went for plum, and Mindy opted for orange. Trina and I then chose two colors we thought would work well in our palette ( the green and grey). We all get to chose our own fabrics for our blocks, as long as we stay within the palette. We’ll make three blocks each month- one to keep and one for each of the other ladies. The plan is to post our blocks to the blogs on the final Wednesday of each month (as you can see- I’m late this time!)

So, I needed some fabric! Yay, fabric shopping!

First, I shopped my stash, but only found a few scraps that fit what I needed.

My next stop was Gossypium in Issaquah, WA. My husband’s office (when he’s not working from home) is conveniently located 0.7 miles from this amazing fabric shop. If you follow me on Periscope, you saw my ecstatic scope showing off my purchases.

As you can see, I only got three of my colors this time around.  I figured that was enough to get me going for the first month. I plan on doing some more searching for my main orange and grey, as well as picking up coordinating fat quarters of all the colors as I find them.

With fabric in hand, it was time to start thinking about assembling my blocks. Although I owned and had watched Ann Petersen’s Playing with Curves Craftsy class, I had never actually DONE any curved piecing.

So, I refreshed my memory by watching Ann’s lesson on sewing gentle curves and made a couple of practice blocks. These blocks turned out well and are actually going into another quilt that I’ll talk about later this year!

 

 

After the practice blocks, I felt ready to jump in with both feet.

 

I’m not going to lie. These blocks took a long time. They were hard. There was lots of seam ripping and resewing because I wanted my circles to line up just right.

I wasn’t frustrated, though, because I kept in mind that this was a skill building activity. They didn’t HAVE to be perfect, but I wanted to TRY and make them the best I could.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m looking forward to the rest of the blocks in this QAL. I know there’s at least two more  blocks with curved piecing, so I should be an old pro at it before the year is done!

Happy Sewing, ~L

Happy Friday! This week brought lots of snow and terrible weather to all of you friends on the East Coast, but here in the Pacific Northwest, I’m starting to see signs that spring is slowly on her way. Daffodil leaves are starting to emerge and I’m starting to see the buds swelling on the trees.

I’m hoping the coming week brings some relief from the severe weather.

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.

I have to admit- this picture freaks me out. I grew up fishing, crabbing, and clam digging on the Puget Sound, but I still can’t stomach most seafood once it makes it to the plate. Give me some salmon, some halibut- and I’m a happy girl. But throw in anything with shells, tentacles or legs and I’m out!

I chose this picture, though, because the colors were too interesting to pass up! They are so far from anything I would normally choose, that I had to give it a try.

I knew when picking my palette and fabrics that I wanted to use as many colors as possible to show the range of the yellows, reds and purples and help blend everything together.

Also, since the picture itself was grossing me out a bit, I wanted to make my bundle super cute. So I thought to myself: “Who likes seafood- CATS!” Silly, I know, but it worked for me. I started with the Lizzy House Cats and built my bundle from there.

 

Here are the fabrics I chose:

Alison Glass, Sun Print 2016, Corsage in Sun

Lizzy House, Catnap, Cats Cradle in Peach

Leah Duncan, Meadow, Gentle Breeze in Red

Janine Vangool, Uppercase

Cotton and Steel Basics, XOXO in Velvet Ribbon

Violet Craft, Highlands, Cattitude in Peach

Erica Hite, Mouse Camp, Trees in Pink

Hawthorne Fabrics, Stardust in Elderberry

 

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

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.

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

Whew! Ever feel like you’re a ping pong ball bouncing from place to place? That has been my whole week! My son started drivers ed, which is four days a week, plus all of our other activities…. Just call me the ping pong Mama. I’m planning a well-deserved relaxing day at home tomorrow!

Something that has been super exciting for me this week, though, is that we have some new people joining Trina and me for Color Play Friday! Mindy from Quilting Mayhem, Sarah from Sarah Goer Quilts, and Yvonne from Quilty Dream have all decided to get in on the fun this week. Be sure to check them out and give them some love in the comments!

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. Everyone creates 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 the end of a wonderful afternoon of boating in the Puget Sound with my husband and kids. We stopped at one of our favorite places: Jetty Island in Everett, WA. We left shortly after this photo was taken so we didn’t have to dock our boat in the dark, but I wished we could have stayed to watch the whole thing. Washington has some amazing sunsets!

When I started picking the palette colors for this picture, I immediately decided I wanted to do a very masculine bundle. Originally I had more blue, but it wasn’t working for me. When I looked back to the picture, I realized that there was actually a lot more grey, black and beige than was being represented in my palette. So I refocused, added some neutrals and took out some blue, and ended up with what I think is a bundle any man would be happy with!

I did something this week that I’ve never done- putting two of the same fabric in one bundle. It wasn’t for lack of options, I just loved them both and thought they each added something special to the bundle.

Here are the fabrics I chose:

Zen Chic, Figures, Buttons in Graphite

Leah Duncan, Lore, Anecdote in Blue

Leah Duncan, Lore, Anecdote in Gray

Sweetwater, Feed Company, Churn in Vanilla Navy

Leah Duncan, Grammercy, Rush Hour Tan

Hawthorne Threads, Arrows in Onyx

Alison Glass, Handcrafted, Geese in Graphite

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

 

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.  

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. It can be found on our Pinterest page.

I hope you can join us next week!

Happy Sewing, ~L

Horray!  I have another finish for a family member’s quilt that I can check off my list!

This is the Sparkler quilt designed my Lee Heinrich at Freshly Pieced. You can see my previous posts about this quilt here, here, and here. I should note that I changed the fabric placement on my version making it a bit different than the original pattern. I’ve done the pattern both ways, and it it -of course- much easier to do it as written!

In keeping with the quilt’s angular style, I stuck with straightline quilting. I really wanted to do one more set of lines in between these ones, but my son liked it just the way it is and asked me for no more quilting! I figured since he’s the one who will be snuggling up under it, my creative license should bow to his wishes on that choice.

Speaking of snuggling, he’s very happy to have his quilt done and used his day off today to snuggle with it on the couch while watching Netflix on his phone.

This week, I’m linking up to:

 I hope you have a great week!

Happy Sewing, ~L

Have you seen the contest that Rachel over at Stitched in Color is hosting? It’s sponsored by Fabricworm and is a fun exercise in fabric selection inspired by the theme ‘Vintage Rainbow’.

If you’ve been following me long, you know that creating bundles is something I do a lot with Color Play Fridays. I thought this would be a fun change, though, since I’m not limited at all in palette, other than trying to stay focused on the Vintage Rainbow theme.

So, here is my entry for the contest:

 

 

I unintentionally ended up with something that looked more like a study in muted primary colors, but I was so happy with it that I stuck it out.  Also, Rachel makes it clear that we’re going for ‘colorful vintage charm’ over getting every single color in the rainbow. So I used teals, corals, mustard yellows and grey for balance. I also used a lot of florals because they always look vintage to me!

The contest is going on for another day, so there’s still time to make your mosaic for a chance to win pretty fabrics!  Head on over to Stitched in Color to see all the rules and to enter.

Oh my goodness! I forgot it was Friday until I saw a text from Trina about Color Play Friday this morning.  I hightailed it into my office and made pretty good time getting this one done!

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 photo is one of Trina’s. I chose it because the bright colors were just calling to me.  I think it’s the chill of winter, but I’ve been so drawn to bright colors lately. My studio inspiration boards are full of tropical blues and greens at the moment.

The colors in this photo turned out looking a lot more fall-inspired than I thought, but I tried to focus on the brighter side of things and ended up with this fun dinosaur bundle. I chose a few fabrics with doodle motifs to drive home the kid-bundle theme.

Here are the fabrics I chose:

Ann Kelle, Urban Zoologie, Crocodiles in Park

Laura Gunn, Painter’s Canvas in Grass

Karen Lewis,  Blueberry Park, Allotments in Limelight

Kaffe Fasset, Shot Cotton in Tangerine

Art Gallery, Prisma Elements in Apricot Sunstone

Skinny Laminx, Yoyogi Park, Shrubbery in Gold

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 In an Otter Life to see what Trina came up with!

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 mine called Jetty Sunset.

It was taken the same day as one of our previous Color Play Friday photos, Jetty Driftwood.

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