5 purple quilt blocks

These five quilt blocks are ones I made as a swap angel for the Birthday Blocks group on Livejournal. This block is called Rose Dream (I think) and is done by paper piecing. I am pretty familiar with paper piecing, and this is a very simple pp project, but somehow I found it incredibly difficult. It took three separate sewing sessions to get them completed because I kept hitting a point where I couldn't bare to keep on working at them. Strange.

The person who requested these blocks asked only for varying shades of purple, so I dug through my fat quarter stash to get as many purples as I could. I'd found around 30, but managed to lose a few behind the washing machine, so I'm not sure how many I used altogether in the end. I was surprised to find that I had so much purple in my stash, though, because I'm not generally a very big fan of purple. But I love all these fabrics quite a lot, so I probably bought them all individually thinking they were the only purple fabric I'd ever like so well and suddenly I found myself with a couple dozen favourites.

This block really depends on having a good contrast between the two colours in each quarter of the block, and for the most part, I think I did a pretty good job with that. There are two quarters that I'm not overly happy with, but I think the recipient might end up with a few extra blocks (one of the people who'd disappeared without sending all her blocks has reappeared, so there might be some extra swap blocks out there) so if she doesn't like those "bad" quarters, maybe she could pull a couple of these blocks apart to result in four blocks, eliminating the quarters without much contrast.

Anyway, I really hope that Anna, the recipient, likes them when they finally arrive.

Holiday Week Day 2

So I don't actually have anything to post today that actually looks as if it's got anything to do with anything I posted yesterday. Well, it does, it just doesn't look it.

What I did today is cut out and sew together five 12-in blocks. That doesn't sound like a lot, really, and I wish that I'd done more, but it took quite a lot of time anyway. More time than I was expecting, though I was distracted by watching HGTV, which my brother in law had one in the living room.

The first blocks that I worked on are two Swap Angel blocks, the ones I mentioned yesterday when I said that I'd gone looking for blue and yellow fabrics (but hadn't found any). These two blocks are angel blocks for a Birthday Blocks group I follow on Livejournal. The recipient's request was for blues with pale yellows.

I no longer recall the name of this particular block, though I'm going to venture a guess that it's something to do with Flying Geese.

I think this one is called something like Mrs Bryan's Choice, though really it just reminds me of the CBC logo.

This one photographed really badly and if I hadn't already got it packed up to send away, I'd probably take a different picture to try to correct the colouring a bit.

Whenever I have fabric out for one project or another, I always try to cut out pieces to make a Sunlight/Shadows block, so this is one of those blocks. When I participated in the 2007 Birthday Blocks group, I had chosen to receive these blocks from everyone, and then decided to make the quilt using 56 of the blocks. Essentially that meant making around 50 spare blocks. I'm still plugging away at it, one block at a time. (It's important to me, though, that none of my blocks are exactly the same.)

One of these days I ought to unpack the shoe box with all the blocks so far in it. I need to count and see where I'm at. I'd like to know some end is in sight for the project, though I don't really mind too much if it takes another year or two to complete.

The reason I had that orange fabric in the previous block out is that I decided to use up some ugly stash fabric on a Block of the Month group at Livejournal. (Block of the Month.) Our year only just started in October, so this is the first block for the year. I really like the orange fireworks fabric, so it's too bad that the burgundy and the orange are such dingy looking fabrics. They really make everything look quite dull, but I hope that when it all comes together in the end, it'll look a little better than these two blocks on their own.

This is October's block, a 12-inch Memory Wreath.

This block for November, called Road to Oklahoma, is quite similar to the Sunlight/Shadow block I posted earlier. It looks so different though, with the fabrics in such different placement.

Again, you'd really think all that bright yellow would make this block bright and beautiful, but it still looks drab and dingy. Sigh.


Injury of the day: Aggravated an already bad back by spending too long hunched over cutting. Woe.