Pieces and Parts

Start-itis struck me this week, as usually happens when I clean up the cutting table. I had been doing a lot of organizing in the sewing room and, looking over my list of WIPs.  In June 2017 I took a class from Bonnie Hunter when she came to the Camarillo Quilt Association, for her My Blue Heaven quilt (a free pattern on her website).  I chose purple and green and named my two color version My Lupine Heaven.  The hills are covered with lupine just now. 

These are the only two blocks I managed to finish in the class, but pieces and parts aplenty were cut that day.  I guess I could call this Continue-itis!  I cut a lot more from the project box of all the different parts, which will make good leader-enders.  

Bonnie's Essential Triangle ruler saved a lot of fabric, using strips instead of large squares to make the quarter square triangles. 

Another quilt waiting its turn is from Kim Diehl's Simple Comforts book...

 

 

...but not the cover quilt, High Cotton, I already made that one :)  

This is the Twilight Hopscotch quilt, isn't it striking?  I made a pillow cover from stash cheddar fabrics a couple of years ago, and bought two greens and background fabrics for the quilt from Connecting Threads from their Oh My Darling line.  I planned to make the lap quilt bigger yet managed not to buy extra of the star block fabric.  Thinking myself clever, I used Bonnie's Essential Triangle Tool to cut triangles instead of squares for the star points.  Smarter folks than I can see where I went wrong...

I saved fabric but not time, as I did not think through what  pre-cutting off the corner instead of using a marked square would do to the assembly.  Very tedious job to align 64 of these star points.  You'd think I'd have learned a lesson about following directions for the next step, but just wait a sec...

I decided to cut the sewn and matched four patch strips into larger sections and cut after sewing on both sides, as I find pushing 1.5" pieces under the needle tedious.  However, this meant that the two resulting four patches spun in different directions, which I had also not considered.  Fortunately, that was unimportant for this particular block. 

Love these two green prints!  The background fabric is called "Kitchen Twine" and is a subtle ecru.  Many more pieces are ready to assemble and I look forward to more Twilight Star blocks piling up.  It's good to have more project boxes see the light of day.