It’s retreat time….

I am so excited because next week I will get to spend 5 days doing nothing but sewing, eating, and visiting with quilters. Could it get any better???

The problem with a retreat where you can work on anything that you want is trying to figure out exactly WHAT I want to work on!!

At the last retreat, I started a scrap quilt and worked on it…..

……until I ran out of fabric. When I got home I cut a bunch more squares so that project is ready to go.

I have another Angela Walters FMQ challenge (“Echos and Curves”) that I can work on…..

Although, I would prefer to wait until I can work on my sit-down long arm.

My list of future projects is LONG….LONG…..LONG, but it is hard to know where to start and figure out which ones I can easily work on.

So, can you help me? How do you decide what to take on retreats???

Critique Time

Last week I posted about the last-second finish of the “Wellspring” quilt…..

Now that I have had some time after finishing the project, I wanted to do a critique of it.

First of all, I am SUPER excited about how it turned out so please don’t hear this critique to be a criticism of me or my work.

I am doing this to hopefully get better…..to improve for the next quilt!!

Here are my thoughts….

I LOVE the colors!! It was a good idea to use a color palette to help me pick!! I also think that I could do it in red, white, blue and gold and it would make a magnificent Quilt-of-Valor!!

I like the “whirlwind” block and think that it makes a great base for the quilt

I am not sure about the smaller pinwheel blocks….

Would it have been better if I had left off the outside rose triangles? That would have opened the alternating blocks up more and given more background……

…or maybe change the background inside the pinwheel to open it up even further (right one).

OR…..what if I set the small pinwheels on point….

OKAY….enough!!!

The bottom line is that there are some other options that I want to pursue.

Personally, I like the two versions where the pinwheel is on point.

What do you think…..Original or #1,2,3 or 4????

Wellspring Pattern Design

Last weekend I posted about picking the colors for my latest quilt that I am calling “Wellspring”.

I had found the inspiration for this quilt from a YouTube video by “Teresa Down Under” with the company “Sewn Up”. You should check out her Youtube channel HERE.

In her video, she was showing three different ways to make a “whirlwind” quilt block and this one was my favorite of the three….

I did some quick calculations…..

…and decided that I would work with an 8-inch block.

I followed her instructions to make a block with 3 strips on one side, and then to cut it in half diagonally…..

The main block that was made from these subsets was gorgeous….

…but the alternating block was plain….

I immediately saw that this particular seam was going to be hard to match….

…and I wondered if I wanted to go to all of that effort to have a block that basically looked like this….

If I was going to do that, I might as well just make it from plain strips of fabric!!

So, I went back to the initial block…

…and started thinking about what I could do with it!!

I jumped onto Electric Quilt and began playing with possible designs. I felt as if I wanted to keep a pinwheel/spinning design in the alternating block and ended up with this idea….

Now to figure out how to piece it without wasting LOTS of fabric.

Pantone Color of the year – 2022

A few weeks back, I posted about the Pantone Colors of the year for 2021 and the response I got on Facebook was puzzling.

Many commenters seemed to think that, by naming a “color of the year”, they were EXPECTED to like and use that color.

I certainly don’t see it that way. I am always looking for color combinations that I like and my exploration of the Pantone Color was just out of interest to find another one!!

One reader….Laura McHugh…. sent a photo of the quilt that she made using the 2021 colors…..

I love that she took the colors and determined to make something from them. WELL DONE LAURA!!

So, today I want to introduce you to the Pantone Color of the Year for 2022…..

Periwinkle!!

Don’t you love how saying the name tickles your tongue?

As I searched further on the Pantone site, they had designed several different palettes that used the Veri Peri color….

They are all so interesting and I am intrigued by this last one. Wouldn’t it be fun to start with blacks, greys, and tans and then add the POP of Periwinkle?? Maybe I will have to give it a try in 2022!!

I hope that you find the colors that you love in 2022 and create MANY projects using them!!

My FAVORITE store

Yesterday I posted about being asked to design a quilt using the “Into The Woods” fabric line by Sarah Watson (@hisarahwatson) and Cloud 9 Fabrics…..

As I studied this collection, I realized that I was going to need some solids to add to the mix. Normally, I would have just pulled some from my stash but I remembered that, if this was a pattern for sale, I needed to use current fabrics that could be purchased by the quiltmakers.

This meant….A TRIP TO THE FABRIC STORE!!!

And, when I say FABRIC store, this is what I mean…..

Are you drooling yet???

There is even fabric on the ceiling….

But on this day, I walked past all of the amazing prints and headed to the back corner where the Moda solids were housed…..

These were the fabrics that I had in my mind to purchase, BUT, when I started looking at them, I felt that the solid didn’t work well with the “Into the Woods” prints.

So, I moved over one shelf and found these…..