My First Swap

On a whim, I signed up for the Rainbow Charm Swap at Ellison Lane Quilts. I've never done a swap before, but it is so fun! There are 56 members, we each get assigned one of eight colors, and you have to buy one yard of two different patterns in your color. Then you cut each one into 56 charms, mail them on over, and get back 112 lovely charms in all shades of the rainbow! We have a Flickr group, and you're supposed to post your fabric picks on there so there are no duplicates. It is so exciting see what everyone else picked and what I'm going to be getting! My color was red. I had great ideas of what to get for every color except red. It's not a color I usually go for. I'm not even sure I have a single piece of red fabric. I played around with the color grid at Hawthorne Threads, and came up with these...

Manufacturer: Robert Kaufman
Designer: Robert Kaufman House Designer
Collection: Metro Living
Print Name: Tiles in Garnet

Manufacturer: Cloud 9
Designer: Heather Moore
Collection: Cut Out & Keep
Print Name: Free as a Bird in Crimson

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!

Pretties

I did a little shopping today...

I love this fabric more than any other fabric I've ever seen! That includes all of the fancy schmancy designer fabric out there! I want to sleep in this fabric and wear it and decorate with it... I think this is what I'm going to use to make one of the bags from the patterns I bought the other day. That way I can look at it every day :) The reason I went there in the first place was to buy some thread...

Pretty, colorful thread to go with the little zippy pouches I'm going to make with these...

Handbag zippers I ordered online that came in yesterday! I like the longer zipper pulls on these. So many pretty supplies :) I've been working on my color blocks quilt and some embroidery that I'm hoping to finish soon so I can actually put a picture of something I've made! Oh ok, here is a WIP picture...

Not crafty related, but I also ordered this shower curtain from Anthropologie to use in my apartment I'm going to get after I finish nursing school. It's so beautiful, it makes me want to cry...

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