RSC 21 Under Carolina Blue Skies

 

The color for April is Blue - Light and Bright! I have lots of blue in my stash. Partly because I love the color and partly because I live in central North Carolina - which for Basketball fans is home to the battle of the blues. You might guess from the blog post which side we fall on. I recently celebrated 20 years with UNC Chapel Hill. My husband will reach 30 years next year. Our son is in love with a Duke fan... we don't speak sports with her family. But I digress.

This week I worked on several projects in blue.  I picked out and cut the pieces for my Modern Blocks.

This month I stayed purely blue with the blocks. And limited the palette. I used my photos to keep track of which colors went with each block as I was cutting.

Each bit was placed by number and clipped together once all were cut. So I was able to use strips of each fabric to cut for all blocks at once. They are now clipped, pressed, and tucked into the book ready for me to sew them together.  My plan was to use at least one of these as a leader/ender while sewing together binding strips, but as the binding is black and these have light fabrics, I made a string block instead.

Speaking of binding...

The Marvel quilt is quilted, and as of this writing the binding has been stitched on the front and clipped down so that I can sit and hand stitch it. It feels good. However, as much as I like the crisp look of black binding, I really don't like working with it. The first challenge was to find the black seam so that I could trim off the excess. My lighting was not up to it. I did figure out that if I lined up the seam with the 60 degree mark on the cutting mat, I could then line up the 1/4 mark of the ruler on the same line and get a crisp cut.

Thankfully, I have figured out where I went wrong joining binding strips a few weeks ago and all six strips went together correctly.  This kit provided exactly 1" inch more binding material than I ended up needing. It would have been a challenge if I had cut something incorrectly or needed to re-join anything. Big sigh of relief when I won the game of binding chicken that I didn't know I was playing.

Back to the blues.  I use a lot of garnet and gold in my quilts (I grew up in Tallahassee).  So for my Rockstar Sampler quilt, I decided to go with blues. This sampler is 30 blocks to feature the 30 motifs in the class I'm taking. As we have more blue walls in the house than red, I decided on a blue sampler.

I spent way too much time trying to decide on colors and layout. A 5 x 6 layout has some limitations in terms of pattern. I didn't want to do a checkerboard, though that would have been the easiest. I don't do things the easy way. I pulled a stack of blues from my stash and first tried a diagonal dark to light (and back to dark). Then I tried moving from blue to aqua or blue to purple. I didn't have 10 colors that played well together.

While participating in the Scenic Route shop hop a few weeks ago, I started picking up more blue. Then I found a layer cake with enough coordinating colors, so I figured my problem was solved. Except that  none of the colors had 5 squares of the same color. So I was back at the starting gate again. I didn't get a great exposure of the test layout, the colors above aren't true - the ones below are more realistic. While catching up with a good friend, I started playing with a more random color placement. I don't do random well. An hour later, it looked nothing like what I thought it would at the start.

Next step was to stack the blocks for each row. Pinned a number to the first block and the other scrap stays on the stack. Lots of hopping up and down from my machine to make sure everything was attached to the correct row.

Which resulted in 6 nice rows to be pressed. The pinned numbers helped me keep the rows in order.

And the final flimsy. Ready to be sandwiched.

I finished sandwiching during a Zoom calls I met online, some of them almost 25 years ago, through a shared interest in Scrapbooking. Many of us are now quilters. The back of this quilt is a dolphin batik (featured in one of the modern blocks) that I bought back when Gus was in elementary school and his mascot was the Dolphin. I loved the fabric, so boldly bought the end of the bolt - which turned out to be nearly 5 yards. Oops.  I'm finally down to less than a yard. I still love the fabric.

As the name of my blog implies, I quilt with a Corgi. Miss Monkey laid claim to the scraps I cut off the Marvel Quilt on Thursday night. She has carefully arranged them in her nest (which is also covered in thread clippings and fabric scraps as it is located adjacent to my cutting station).  She is affectionately known around the house as "Speed Bump." At 15 she has her own agenda, which often involves sleeping in hallways. Earlier this afternoon, I headed down the hall with the newly clipped Marvel quilt and the cannister to hold the clips as I take them off. I didn't see her over the quilt, and made contact with a soft tummy. Thankfully after a bit of hopping to maintain balance we are both unscathed. That is the closest she has come to bringing me down to her level that she has achieved. 

Linking to Scraphappy Saturday Blue Skies - RSC 21