Color Challenge Catch-up

Cast your mind back to March when I was happily chugging along on the color challenge by “Patterns By Jen”. It is a great challenge using fruits and vegetables as inspirations. Since that last post, I have fallen behind…..WAY behind, and now it is time to catch up!!

As I headed upstairs with my “supplies” for the day…..

….Michael looked quizzically at me and asked EXACTLY what I was doing. Looking down at the array of items on my tray, it was an understandable question!!

The block for April is based on CHERRIES…

….one of my favorite fruits, and I kept dipping my hand into the bag and eating my inspirations!!

Cherries are amazing spheres of goodness and the color is so deep and saturated…..

It was fun to pull out my red fabrics and decide which ones to use for the block…..

The block for this month has TWENTY-EIGHT fabric pieces in a SIX inch block….whew!!

The directions began with cutting 1 inch strips of two fabrics and sewing them together. I was not confident of my seam allowance so decided to fudge it a bit and cut them bigger to begin with…..

….sew them together…..

….and then trim them to the needed 1.5 inch size with 3/4 of an inch on each side.

Because the strips were so narrow, I found it hard to get them to lay completely straight on the cutting mat so that I could make a clean cut. I solved this problem with a bit of painter’s tape…..

The tape was used to hold the bottom edge against one of the lines on the mat. Remember that I was NOT using the mat for the measurement. This made the cutting SO much easier…..

I did have to be careful when pulling the tape off as it shredded a bit of the fabric edge…..

Next I sub-cut the strips into 3.75 inch segments and carefully sewed them into blocks containing 6 strips….

I was thrilled that the blocks trimmed easily to 3.5 inches.

The next step was to cut two, ONE inch squares from each of the fabrics. These are SERIOUSLY small pieces…..

After marking a diagonal line across the square, it was sewed to the blocks…..

I was thrilled to come away with an almost perfect 6.5 inch block!!!

Now came the fun of designing a “flat-lay” with my block and my inspirations….

This one is a bit flatter…..

Each month we are supposed to share something about the inspiration and this time I was reminded of the first time that I ever ate FRESH cherries. We were traveling in Portugal and were taken into the Douro valley outside of Porto. We ended up in a small village that was preparing for a festival and it was fun to see the floats and other decorations!! We stopped at one roadside vendor and ended up buying a kilo of cherries (for $2!!). If you would enjoy spending the day with us, please check out THIS POST…..

Okay….that takes care of one month…..more to come!!