Another Design Wall Monday

 

On my design wall this week is the Buck a Block that I started a few years back. I finished the blocks and this week I hope to complete the cornerstone blocks and sashing. If things go really well, I’d like to get to the border, too. I’m not sure if you can tell, but the outside strips of the sashing are a small check of the wine color, green and gold that is in the blocks.

This is actually on my UFO Challenge list but is not the current or past choice. I’m to the point on my past months challenges that they are all ready to be quilted. The bad news is that it is getting to be about a month since a chip went bad on the robotic quilter and we are still waiting to get a good one to replace it. Until then, no quilting….I did get a row and a third done on my new quilting table/frame and I was loving how well things were working. In the meantime, I figured I’d get a head start on something so I don’t lose any time. Now that the weddings are over and it is way to hot to go camping, I have a good amount of time to sew, and I want to take advantage of it!

Click over to JudyL’s site to see what other quilters are working on, it is inspirational!

Design Wall Monday–Y2K center is together!

I spent a fair amount of time at the lqs choosing fabric for the sashing and for the side borders, then cutting and getting all the sashings sewn on. Marcella made a comment last Monday that whatever color I used for the sash, that is the color that the quilt would read.  I looked at my little sample quilts with all the different color sashes and concluded that she was right. While both Moth and I liked the cheddar, and I have been wanting to work with cheddar, I really don’t want a king size hunk of cheddar on my bed. The room would be so bright we would never get any sleep!  You can see what I decided to use.

The center of the quilt is now completed. It is too big for the design wall, it is on the queen sized bed in the guest room, but you still can’t see all of it.This week I will work on the side borders. I’m going to have to quilt this in sections and then assemble them. I want it to hang far enough over the sides that when we are under it, it still keeps us covered and any draft out.

Go over to JudyL’s blog and see what others are doing.

Design Wall Monday

The design wall still has blocks for the Y2K, and then some additional yardage as I was auditioning colors  to use for sashing yesterday. You can see why using a print background to get a feel for a gray (or whatever) sash didn’t work, and why I resorted to Photoshop.

Please take a look at yesterday’s post and give me your opinion on the best sashing color to use.http://goingtopieces-gail.blogspot.com/2011/07/input-needed-please.html

and then check out JudyL’s page to see what many talented quilters have on their design walls.

Input needed, please

I have been working on my Y2K and have about 60 of the 80 blocks completed, the remainder is in strips ready to be assembled into blocks. Needless to say, they don’t all fit on the design wall.

I had been thinking of using either black

             or perhaps a dark red like this:The small white squares are the signature squares.

I asked on online quilter friend in Norway (gotta love the internet) to help me choose. Wouldn’t you know, she had a different idea – gray.  I never would have thought of it, but she thought black might be too harsh. I think she could be right. So, this morning I dug through the stash and started pulling different colored fabrics to get an idea of what they would look like as sashing. Hey, if gray might be better, maybe another color might be even better! Changing fabrics on the design wall to try each color became laborious, and since many of my fabrics were prints, I wasn’t getting a good idea of how any given color would work. Enter MOTH (Man of the House) and Photoshop. So much easier to try different colors in Photoshop!  Thanks, my dear MOTH. 

Here is what a cement gray would look like: (and HG, I do like it, thanks for the suggestion and for getting me thinking outside my box)

                      Cheddar                     taupe

hmm, a sick gold, was going to say spicey brown mustard, but I don’t think I’d want to eat mustard that was this color…….

               a grayish blue                  navy 

 

or this ….odd shade of….brown?(do you think anyone except Photoshop actually makes this color?)

Which would you use?  Something totally different?

Happy Fourth of July! and Design Wall Monday

Wishing a safe and wonderful Independence Day to Yanks all over the world. A special thanks to those who serve and may be far from home on this holiday.

Design Wall Monday is here again, and this time I have something to show.  June’s UFO challenge was the Y2K quilt that I started….well, in Y2k.  It didn’t get very far, and I wasn’t happy with how it was going together. I gave it more thought, came up with a few more ideas and then, after all the wedding was over on the 18th, I began to work. Do any of you remember the great Y2K swap on the internet?  The idea was to get 2000 squares of fabric from all over the world. There were several sites online to contact other quilters that wanted to participate. Each quilter would send 25 squares of different fabrics plus a signature square to each person she exchanged with. If you exchanged with 80 other people, you would get your 2000 squares. If you exchanged with someone from each of the 50 US states and the 13 Canadian provinces and territories, you would already have 63 packets or 1575 squares. I exchanged with quilters all over the world, from Japan, Denmark, Mexico, Bahrain and many other places. Watching for the mail each day was exciting.

Anyway, this past month I began piecing each person’s squares into a 25 patch. My hope was to keep each persons contribution together.  As I put the blocks together I became fascinated by what the fabrics told me about each quilter. One gal either really liked sunflowers, or had recently made something requiring a selection of sunflower prints and had lots left over.

  One person had a lot of tans in her stash,

another a lot of greens, yet another many fun, kid type animal prints, bold colors.

 

One had many tiny floral prints in soft pastels.  Were these fabrics an example of what the quilter loved and had in her stash, or were these the things in her stash that she was ready to get rid of?

 

Here are some of the first 48 blocks on my newly made (and not quite finished) design wall.

And some of the rows of five, pinned together for more squares.

Meanwhile, I finally mounted a quilt on my new quilt frame, did a little more than one row of quilting and the PCQ went kerflewy. I am now waiting for a chip to arrive and be installed before I can do any more quilting. It was going so well until then….*sigh*