20 January 2022

The Very Cozy Inside Day

I hate my new phone. The pictures are fuzzy and the sound is off..
Here is my Crossroads more than halfway done.  Almost finished with block 9 but I did not have it in me tonight.
Here I am messing around with Flying Geese orphan blocks.
And my Kale candy from Sherry to save my day...(Yum)
Today has been a wonderful day.
Once again I have so many projects to work on, I do not know where to start.!!

The Oregon Alpaca visit was a success!!



One more day of zooming and sewing...Four hours of Zooming and four hours of sewing!  Yeah me.!!
Rain and yuck cannot mess with my serenity xo

Dear me I published this on the wrong site.  Now, I do not know how to fix it...Sorry xo
















 

14 January 2022

Pick a Color - My Plan




I have spent far too much time pondering 
how to approach this challenge.

I love the idea - it's how I work a lot of the time.

But I haven't been able to settle on a particular project,
so I've come up with a different plan.

The gestation period, which includes a source
of inspiration to inform my color palette, 
the actual fabric pull from my stash, 
and choosing a design that suits the situation,
is a favorite aspect of the quilt making process.

So I'm going to indulge my love of planning.

Which leads us to Color Palette No. 1 




In addition to the glorious blooms of this year's amaryllis,
I watched Wanda make a series of three pink quilts in 2021.

(two are in this post and the third is here)

Her inspiration plus these beautiful flowers led me
to think about making a pink quilt from my stash.




Starting with the idea of a sixteen-patch design
I pulled twelve pairs of darker/lighter pinks.


Hmmm . . . 




My thinking about design morphed several (!) times
and ended up here - with the Rail Fence design from
Sujata Shah's Cultural Fusion Quilts book.




Another view of the stunning flowers.




I chose this stripe from the stash for binding
as an homage to the veining in the petals
and the black with pink flowers for backing.




But in the end I decided 
not to make these fabrics into a quilt.

It all felt like I was being too literal.




And working through the process turned out
to be enough to satisfy me for now.


* * *

I will share Color Palette No. 2 in February.

If all goes well, I'll have six palettes 
to share during our six month challenge period.

And who knows . . . 
one of them might actually turn into a quilt.




08 January 2022

AHIQ Challenge, Color Palette Challenge Inspiration!

Adding to the Four Patch blocks I've hand and machine pieced.

Calendar color of the month page I saved from my last year calendar.

 
Hello Quilt Friends from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada!
Sunny weather and cool here.
 
Kaja posted a new AHIQ Challenge and it's choose a Color Palette.
Which is fine by me and easy since I knew right away what I'd choose because the colors have been in the back of my mind since summer. 

I began by finding photos that I keep coming back to and projects and fabrics that are influencing me right now. And the page I saved from my last years color calendar says it all,
Orange, yellow and blue.

So with that decision the challenge is on. I'm not in any hurry, however, we are still in the process of moving/settling in. I have limited space right now for projects, but I have a lot of time for planning/dreaming, which is the best part.

In a day or two I'll post more info and inspiration on my blog, do stop by to visit.

And we do have a lot to be thankful for, don't we?

07 January 2022

Color Palette Challenge - So Many Options

 



The newest AHIQ challenge involves 
choosing a color palette.

I looked back through my previous quilts
and some of my pending projects since
I love working from an inspiration image/idea.




The fabric pull above was inspired by 
this much-loved photo of my grandson.




This is a fabric pull for a possible project
that I have named Sapphire.




It was inspired by this photo of Little Man.




This free pieced barn quilt
hangs in our foyer.

(one of the quilts made when I
was doing trunk shows for my book)




It was inspired by this photo
taken as I drove home from St. Louis.




I tore this ad out of a magazine
because the combination of textures
and colors caught my eye.




This was the first of three quilts
inspired by that image.




These are the other two that now
 live with my sister and her husband.

(clearly I cut way too many HSTs)




The palette for Dumpster Diving 10 - Do Tell . . .



. . . was inspired by this idea.




This is Namaste - made for our younger son's 40th birthday.



It was inspired by this photo from a street festival.




I made Happy Strings during a 
PINK and ORANGE challenge with my friend Lynne.




This glorious iris from a gardening catalog
had a strong influence on my color palette.




This is The Kitchen Door quilt.




When I was painting our front doors red,
I shared this photo on Instagram (not there any longer)
and a friend commented that it should be a quilt.

I agreed with her.


* * *

With all of that said/shown,
I'm still pondering how I want to approach
this new challenge . . .

All in good time.


01 January 2022

New year, new challenge

 That's right: it's 2022 and it's time for our next challenge. 

I've been around the houses a bit on this one.  Had an idea, discarded it.  Had another idea - it was okay, but wasn't really something I wanted to try, which didn't feel quite in the spirit of things.  I have considered both block-based challenges and one or two that, like the symmetry/asymmetry one, might push us to think about our approaches in a more general way.  Nothing has quite floated my boat and it it's not doing it for me, that's not the greatest of starts, is it?

But to get to the point, after all that beating around the quilty bush, I am setting a challenge I am calling 'pick a colour'.  I have a pinterest board where I save things just because they have colour combinations I love.  It has everything from buildings to landscapes to spools of thread.  

I save them but then they just sit there and I'm guessing I'm not the only person who does that.  I even have, saved in a notebook, written descriptions of colour palettes, from other peoples quilts, from nature (and yes, my family do laugh at me when I sit there trying to recall all the colours I saw at the bottom of a rockpool).  

So I am asking you to pick a colour palette, no limits or restrictions on how many, or how few shades it includes.  Maybe you could try a colour you wouldn't normally think of, or throw an oddball into the mix.  Maybe you think that's a hideous option and you want to use 57 shades of blue.  Whatever you want is okay, but if possible, share an inspiration picture or description, so we can have the fun of seeing where it leads you.