Hourglass challenge update

 I started this quilt in a Sherry Lynn Wood workshop back in November. Since it was a two day workshop, I brought home only the beginnings of something. 

See me pondering what that something was? Let's just say I was not impressed. And things didn't look better when I got home. All I could think was that I had the bare bones of something.

In January I challenged the Cotton Quilters' Guild to bring a difficult unfinished project to the next meeting. At that time we would each present the project and tell the group what our challenge was. 

In March we were to bring the project to show. The beauty of the idea was that everyone got to choose her own piece and decide for herself what she would try to accomplish. 

At some point I combined that challenge with the AHIQ hourglass challenge. It really began morphing at that point, and I decided to try a Chinese Coins setting. AHIQ might save me a second time, right?

And this, dear friends is where we are now. So onto the longarm it goes. Hopefully this week.

Rose Quilt

I have several ideas for flowers on quilts but haven't had time or space to work on them yet. There are so many tops and blocks hanging around I pulled this one out and forced myself to work on the quilting. And it came out better than expected - which often seems to be the case after I've worried myself into a tizzy.

Chinese Coins with Roses quilt

While it started before this challenge, it is my first flowery finish.

More details on my blog.  Ann

Two Good Finishes to Close Out the Summer

Here's the two latest finishes originally resulting from AHIQ prompts. One was deemed,  'Use Your Words' and the other was a later 'Coins' challenge. They were both started in the year 2017 and the quilt tops have been completed for quite some time now. 

Make Beautiful Things

As always, these prompts are open ended which is something that I appreciate very much. Having lots of room for creativity is something my brain seems to thrive on. Somehow I tend to merge most of the challenges with yet another one. The first quilt could also qualify for a response to the 'Two-Block' challenge or even 'Playing with Scale'.

Count Your Blessings

This Coins quilt has the 'Use Your Words' thing going on and also perhaps the 'Two-Block' challenge incorporated as well. Ann and Kaja are clever to take simple ideas and open up a whole new way of looking at them. Invariably, I end up with so many ideas that they predictably spill over into several other quilts! Of course I have written lots and lots more about these late summer finishes of mine if you're interested in reading anything extra....

Red, Two Blocks, and Chinese Coins Mashup

The border of the Square Deal is finally done. I hope. After a few months in time out, I changed a few blocks in the outer border to get better definition. Now they move from crips delineation at the bottom left to more diffusion at the top right. {EDIT: I retook and replaced the photo. This one is better but now a bit cooler than real life. Sigh.}

The Square Deal quilt top

The center mixed some Chinese Coins that just didn't make it as a quilt with HSTs in every shade of solid red/peach/pink in the stash. The triangles are all ruler cut although {if I'd been thinking} free-hand might have looked better.

The crosses are Sujata's Lattice design from Cultural Fusion Quilts and they were scissor cut. My crosses widen with each set. The first ones were so narrow that the seams overlap after pressing but the last few are superhighways!

Does that mean I finished three improv invitations at once?

1. Chinese Coins {because those were the original units for the striped triangles} 
2. Two Blocks
3. Red is a Neutral (because I played with several fabrics before deciding red looked best with those striped triangles}

"Red" stretches it a bit. These reds all read as foreground rather than background. Must {and will} try again.

Also posted on my blog.