August OMG Goal

Well, I didn't finish my July One Monthly Goal over at Red Letter Quilts, which was to machine quilt this star quilt.

I got about halfway done and then decided it wasn't worth giving up sleep to finish! Here's a peek at what it looks like so far--I have all of the stars done and one section of black finished (look closely...it doesn't show up really well in this photo!). I chose four different free motion designs for the star points, just for practice, and then I'm doing straight lines for the black sections. The pieced parts are so busy that the quilting isn't really evident, and that's fine, but I do like the straight lines on the black background sections! 

My August OMG is to finish this quilt--finish the machine quilting and then bind it. I'm planning to do a colorful scrappy binding. Here's hoping I have better luck this month! 

Joseph and the Technicolor Dream Coat meets an Irish blessing

And if that's not the most unusual blog header I've ever written, I don't know what is!

Back in January, Victoria over at 15 Minutes Play put out a Tea Towel Challenge.

I bought this tea towel, which spend the next 4 months sitting in my studio, gazing woefully at me.

My husband's family is Irish, and I've always liked this blessing, and I had the vague notion of creating made fabric in various shades of green and thens sewing Drunkard's Path blocks that would frame the tea towel and represent the rolling hills of Ireland.

I got this far and it just wasn't working for me.

I think I may have been "greened out" after the Emerald Challenge. I was also struggling with adding brown and green so close to the brown and green border on the towel itself. 

So I decided to go bright instead. I pulled solids and wanna-be solids and (loosely) grouped them in warm and cool color combos.

I tried to do some wavy piecing of some of the strips--something I always admire and can't quite seem to make happen myself.

Building the border:

And more:

And more:

 I had planned on an inner brown border, but again it was too close to the border on the tea towel, so I created a tiny pieced border first out of the scraps from the outer border.

Seeing these tiny bright scraps chain pieced together just made me happy!

And the result:

Now you understand the title of this blog post--it's very bright and technicolor-y!

I am unsure about quilting this one--specifically the tea towel part, as it's a bit loose and stretchy, and I don't want to distract from the words. I'd welcome any suggestions!