Quilty Zest: bowtie

Thursday, June 27, 2013

Curve should be a four-letter word

Tonight my studio was block central. And the curves almost did me in, wonky or not.

Let me explain. I signed up on the wait list to join do. good stitches back in February or March. In May, I was invited to join the Believe group. (If you're not familiar with do. good stitches, click here. In a nutshell, quilters come together through Flickr to contribute 2 blocks each month for charity quilts. It's very cool and seems to be well-organized, as well as churn out a steady flow of charity quilts, which is fantastic.) Needless to say, I was excited!

Here are May's blocks, which I never got around to posting.

The June block request was for a wonky bullseye based on a block in the book "Fat Quarterly Shape Workshop for Quilters." Doing more curved piecing has been on my to-do list. Wonky curved piecing--even better, right?--it hides mistakes! Here are my blocks:

Nowhere in the directions for this month's blocks did I see the requirement that the block had to be flat, so I think I'm okay. This was tough! Add to that the color combo--a very cool gray, yellow and white palette was requested--but my stash is a little short on those colors, so I was afraid I wouldn't have enough! (Yes, it's a little ridiculous that someone who hosted a Shades of Gray fabric swap would be short on grays, but a) I used all of those up and b) they were only 5" squares!)

By the second block I was having more fun, and I definitely want to do some more curved piecing--will be looking for a class at one of my local quilt shops or perhaps Craftsy? I know there's room for improvement! If you tackle this block, here's my (learned-the-hard-way) advice: don't be stingy on fabric. Cut generous pieces for each curve and just deal with the waste/scraps. More wiggle room/room for error makes piecing these much more pleasant! I have seen a few of the other members' bullseye blocks on Flickr and I can't wait to see this quilt put together!

And the last blocks of the night, my Bowtie blocks for the Great Lakes Modern Quilt Guild. I volunteered to put together the online guild activities every other month when we don't meet. I posted this month's project last weekend and thought it might be nice to offer a visual aid, so here we go:

The assignment: Bowtie blocks using white solid/print/text backgrounds and warm colors. Confession time: I purposely picked warm colors because I gravitate toward cool colors and wanted to make myself work with something different. Thanks go the guild for unknowingly forcing me out of my color comfort zone! :)
Can't wait to see everyone's at our meeting in a month!

Back in April I showed my converging corners blocks for the guild meeting. Here's a quick floor picture of everyone's blocks together--looks great, doesn't it? One lucky person won these blocks and will be bringing back the quilt to show when she finishes it.

p.s. Linking up with WIP Wednesday at Freshly Pieced.

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Gone Dotty!

I am lucky to be one of the blogs posting on the LAST day of Sew We Quilt's Dots on Dots blog hop. Thanks so much to the fearless leader of this blog hop and many others, Madame Samm, and the cheerleader/hostess, Corrie of QuiltTaffy--it's been so much fun following along and seeing everyone's dotted creations!

Be sure to scroll down to the bottom of this post ~~to enter the giveaway~~!
The giveaway is now closed. Thank you for visiting!

My initial thought was to do bowtie blocks. It seemed a perfect fit for polka dot fabrics! I made this small quilt using dotted fabric from my stash and a white-on-white circle print. I quilted it 1/4" from each horizontal and vertical seam line. I love how this turned out, but since I'd wanted to do a quilt made of small blocks, I really wasn't following the rules about block size for the hop.

So I went back to my stash again and came up with this:

It is very bright and cheery. And hurts the eyes a little bit, I think!

Log cabins (both wonky and traditional) are my go-to block. They're easy, they're fun, and pretty much any fabric looks great in the pattern.

Every fabric in the quilt, except for the sashing, is from my stash. And I still have enough dotted fabric left to make two more quilts this size, easily. Scary! :)

Here's a close-up of one my favorite blocks:

Here you can see my sashing audition. I wanted a black and white dot fabric and could only find this optical illusion print. I bought 1 yard and decided I'd make it work, because the blocks definitely needed something DARK to separate them. A place to rest the eyes between each bright block.

I decided that I preferred the uniform smaller dot size for the sashing, so I fussy cut sashing rows and reserved the fussy-cut larger dot strips for the outer border.

Here it is with the outer border, which provides a good frame.