Hollow Blocks Quilt Top

I finished the quilt top! Yay! I got outside and took a couple of pictures just before it started to rain.

It's queen sized - 90" x 96" (theoretically). It took one Kona classics jelly roll, one Kona brights jelly roll, and 6 yards of Kona natural. That should be approximately 80 different colors! I also used a little bit of orange dots from Summer SOng bu Riley Blake. I did a decorative stitch in orange thread to match the back which is going to be orange with a strip of the remaining color scraps. The binding is going to be more strips from the jelly rolls which I had set aside.

I was inspired by this quilt which is based off of this pattern. I made my own paper piecing pattern which you can get here.

And since it's Wednesday, I thought I'd add this to WIP Wednesday at Freshly Pieced! This is my first time, so I hope I'm doing it right!

Hollow Blocks + Strips

So I've been putting together all of those hollow blocks (as I've come to call them). Today I made one set of strips to go in between the blocks. I love the way it turned out! There are going to be five of these total. I wish I would have made these wider with maybe only one row of blocks. I think I would have liked more color and less of the Kona natural. That's ok though! I'm going to use every last bit of color from two jelly rolls.

Not bad for my first attempt at free handed piecing. Everything seems all nice and straight. One thing about the jelly rolls that I'm not too crazy about is they have way more blues and greens than any other color. There is probably more blue than all of the other colors put together. They need more pink, purple, and orange! It's been really hard to arrange the colors to look random without a ton of blues and greens all bunched together.

144 Blocks

Finally something quilt related! I finished making the hollow block squares for my solid colors quilt today.

That's 144 blocks made out of 36 different colors! I got kind of bored and tired of making these blocks, so I did some highly scientific number crunching and completely redesigned the quilt!

(Don't worry, I normally draw much better than this!) I'm going to alternate two rows of hollow blocks with three rows of these color strips and have a strip of Kona natural in between.

It's kind of hard to describe, but it makes sense in my head. I'll probably cut the strips into 12 inch long pieces. I'm going to piece together the leftover scraps and use them in the back of the quilt along with a pretty solid color (maybe like aqua blue).

Time to start piecing the blocks together!

Color Blocks Update

I'm up to 10 colors! I'm trying to decide if I want to sew some little flowers or something in the middle of each block. I've got some rainbow variegated thread that I've been saving which I think would be perfect for this project. I just have to figure out how and where to use it.

Rainbow Jelly Rolls

I got some fat quarter bundles and jelly rolls for Christmas, but I hadn't really had time to do anything with them.

I was admiring this quilt the other day, and inspiration struck in the middle of the night! What I love about the quilt is the bright, rainbow of colors. So I thought this would be a good way to display my rainbow jelly rolls. It is based off of this free pattern. I'm going to go with 5 inch squares, and I made my own pattern to paper piece the blocks because I'm still not confident in my ability to sew a straight line ;-) I can get 4 squares out of each color with a little 1 inch strip left over. I'm thinking I can use the scraps to make some kind of border or in the binding. I've done 3 colors so far. The background is Kona Natural.

Jessica