Carolina Christmas redux

Does this look familiar? A Quiltville group member in Belgium made a version of Carolina Christmas in colors something like these - mine are paler - and varied the blocks by adding the squares of the opposing colors in the centers. Stars get red centers, poinsettia blocks get blue ones. I liked the look so much that I decided to try it and initially was going to make this half scale, but after a test block I decided to do a smaller (3 x 3) quilt in full size instead. I have made and admired miniature quilts before but this one didn't work. The shrunken design was too busy and ditsy and you couldn't see the details on the fabric. This quilt will have the pieced border too and will be 60" x 60". It will grace my back hall wall during the winter. Something about it reminds me of winter, with the frosty blues, and red and green blocks that echo the colors of my holllies and nandinas during the winter.

Now all I have to do is get it finished before spring.

Carolina Christmas (aka Autumn in Tennessee) finished

I've finished the Quiltville mystery. Here's a picture before the borders were added (I know, there's a block oriented wrong! I fixed it.): And here's a close-up of a corner after the pieced borders were added:

2392 pieces. Whew!

Now I'm piecing a backing (like it wasn't enough work) of one hundred 10 1/2" squares of all the blues, golds and neutrals (ran out of orange, but it will be the binding) and used EQ6 to lay out the colors. Much easier than crawling around on the floor! I made the picture of the quilt before borders by tacking it to the closet door frames with push pins. I had to stand at the other end of the room to get the whole quilt in the picture. Now that the border is added, it's too big to photograph, at least inside the house.

I'm very happy with how it turned out, and I like my alternate arrangement. But, one group member did an interesting change to tie the colors of the two blocks together and used blue, green and red in her quilt. I liked it so much that I'm going to make a small quilt half scale. Half scale means the red squares will finish at 1", and the outer border will be 2" wide. It will be small and fiddle-y work, but will be really pretty in a jewel-like kind of way.

Those little red and blue centers really add to the design. If I had seen this before committing to my layout, I might have done this too. Caroline Van Maele of Brussels designed this change and made the quilt that has inspired me to attempt this miniature. Thank you very much for the idea, Caroline!

Carolina Christmas mystery at Quiltville

Well, since all is revealed at Quiltville, I guess I can blog about the new mystery quilt, Carolina Christmas. Since I had just made two Christmas quilts, I chose colors that were more evocative of autumn in Tennessee. There was the star block: And the Fox and Geese block:

Which went together to make this:

My arrangement is different than the one on Quiltville. She made blocks out of four stars or of four Fox and Geese and then alternated these larger blocks in a checkerboard pattern. On mine, the orange was so strong I needed to arrange the star blocks in a pattern that would carry the orange across the face of the quilt, so I did two concentric boxes with lines radiating out to the corners. I like it. A Quiltville chat commenter said it looked like Santa Fe Christmas, but I still think I'll call it "Autumn in Tennessee". It reminds me of the yellow and rusty leaves in the Smoky Mountains in the fall.

I'm making some progress this morning while doing laundry; I've got five rows sewn together (but not joined).

Letting go of match-y match-y

Part 3 of Carolina Christmas is posted and I'm cutting out patches this morning - 192 blue rectangles and 592 (yes!) neutral squares. I may have to supplement my yardage to have enough neutrals, but that's not a problem. There's a lot more that will work with my initial selections. The thing is, I need to loosen up with the blue rectangles.

I had selected 13 blue fabrics, all various intensities of blue/green. I spread them out this morning and realized something.

I may be able to do scrappy but I'm still too hung up on match-y.

Seen all together like that, there wasn't enough difference between the fabrics. In the interest of cohesion, I had lost variety. Interesting.

So I went into my stash and started pulling more blues, this time looking more for coordination than similarity. In doing this, I incorporated more lights and more darks than I had before. I've got half the rectangles cut and stacked together and I'm liking how it looks. The golds and golden tans in the blocks already made are similar in saturation and tone but vary in pattern. The blue is going to give this quilt its spark, so I better start picking spark-y blues. Here's what I came up with:
Oh, and here's the 592 neutral squares (out of 22 different fabrics):Comfort zone here, me over there. It's a start.

Inspiration comes in many forms

This is the Thanksgiving card I received that got me to thinking about blue/greens, golds and oranges for the Quiltville mystery. Isn't it amazing what will spin off a color scheme for a quilt?

I hope Bonnie posts part 3 of the mystery this evening. And I hope it works with the blue fabrics!

P.S. I got the stitches out of my back today. I think they were in residence a little too long. Ouchie!

Carolina Christmas mystery part 2 done

Not particulary thrilling to look at, but here they are - all 104 of them.

Now I have no excuses and have to clean the house this afternoon.

Carolina Christmas

Bonnie Hunter just posted installment 2 of her mystery quilt (her picture at left). It takes the HSTs I made yesterday, gold and neutrals, and adds more of the gold to make this block. I'm using gold where she used green, so tomorrow's sewing will be more gold and no blue in sight yet. I'm starting to worry that I should have changed around where the blue and gold went. I don't want this quilt to be dull. It's too much work. ARRRRGH!

Carolina Christmas part 1

Well, here's part 1 of the mystery. It's looking more like Tennessee Autumn, which is what I will call it. I hope we use some of my pretty blue fabrics soon. This photo looks kind of dull. The gold fabrics in the HSTs are much brighter in person.

Quiltville's Carolina Christmas mystery is on!

Around 11 p.m. I staggered out of the kitchen after washing the last of the pots and pans. I checked my email before heading for bed to see if I had anything from the family, and there in my inbox was the announcement for part one of Quiltville's new mystery. Well, of course I had to go look at it and print it out, but I was much too tired to do more.

This morning after a quick trip to the post office (that's as far as I was willing to go on Black Friday - luckily it's not near the mall) I started reading the directions. She's given us plenty to work on in the first installment - and, blessedly, no square in a squares! I had to press everything and make a final decision on my neutrals before I could cut, so that gave me one more chance to ponder the color choices.

I pulled out most of the darker neutrals so they would contrast better with all shades of gold but left a few darker tans for interest. I like the selection of golds of all shades and intensities that I'm substituting for the greens, and the good variety of blues which sub for the reds. Instead of the single gold she's using to tie it together I'm using this pretty coral-y orange. I'm happy the colors play well together and have a lot of interest. Now, the only concern is - am I substituting the right colors? It's always a concern when you don't use the colors the mystery designer used. Since you don't have the end result at hand, you can't mock up a block or two in EQ to see how it looks before you cut. I think I'm doing the right thing using gold for green and blue for red, but I can't really be sure until I'm too committed to make changes. This is hard stuff for a control freak.

Well, I've given my back a rest after that stint at the ironing board, so it's time to start cutting!

Oh, by the way, check out the Oct/Nov issue of Quilter's Newsletter (which I JUST RECEIVED - what's up with that?) for a wonderful small basket pattern quilt made from a Moda Layer Cake. Now I just happened to have a layer cake - Moda's Simple Abundance - that wasn't committed to any project so I decided to try it. It's one of those patterns where you sew together patches and then cut to size, and I normally dislike that method, but for this I'll give it a shot. I basted and appliqued basket handles yesterday while the turkey was cooking. I finished all the basting to the freezer paper shapes, but only appliqued 4 out of 12. But I've got a start on it for when I can get back after the mystery.

Dreaming up a color scheme

See that piece of pale blue/green in the bottom left corner? I woke up this morning at 6 a.m. thinking about it. I used a bit of it in my version of "In Lucinda's Garden". You know you're completely controlled by your fabric stash when it wakes you up in the morning. Anyway, I love the color in this fabric and would like to make something else with it.

I got up and pulled it out of the "blue" box in my stash. Then I started looking to see what else wanted to come along. The gold bits on some of these pieces sent me to that box and there I found batiks with the same blue in the pattern. The, of course, I had to find coordinating neutrals.

The stack was lovely but needed a "kick". I thought about rust, but I'm out of it. Then I found a 2 yard piece of that beautiful orange-y coral. I don't even remember why I have it; I seldom use any shade of red or orange. Since blue and orange are complementary colors, a small amount of this accent could really add life to the resulting color scheme.

I guess I still had Bonnie Hunter's new mystery quilt on my mind, because I gravitated toward a color/color/neutral/accent arrangement. So now that I have pulled these fabrics, what should I do with them? Does anyone have a quilt pattern in mind?

ADDENDUM: Oh good grief! Look at the colors in my new background which I recently added. I think this was a subliminal suggestion!

ADDENDUM 2: And, we got a Thanksgiving card yesterday, with golden and rusty leaves on a blue/green background. Another subliminal suggestion. It's nice to know that some part of my brain works on these things without supervision.

Count me in and call me crazy

I may be a glutton for punishment, but I'm officially buying into the new Quiltville mystery. So far with these mystery quilts, I'm batting 0.500. I loved Double Delight, wasn't so happy with Christmas Lights, although it made two nice quilts with a little jiggering. So now she announces the new mystery to begin right after Thanksgiving and what do I do? I start pulling fabric and planning a color scheme. (Keep in mind that I still have six quilts to finish binding. See? I need my head examined. Not to mention that the holiday season is nearly here, and I have to start Christmas shopping.)The mystery quilt is called Carolina Christmas, but I didn't want to make another Christmas quilt after Christmas Lights, so I took a suggestion from Quiltville and made a blue/brown/gold/neutral color scheme. The gold is rather mellow. The blues and browns will substitute for the greens and reds, respectively, and were pulled with an eye to variety of shade, scale and pattern. Not all may be used, but I wanted to get a large pool together to stay really scrappy.

I'm hopeless about taking on too many projects, but after I'm committed to a home for the perpetually overscheduled someone will have a LOT of really nice quilts.