In Love With Rainbows

After seeing Stitched in Colour's 'bottled rainbow' QAL, it reminded me quite how much I love the full *pow* paintbox effect.  Now I've been dilly dallying around of late, not updating my blog but instead worrying about work and starting to make more things.  So today's post is going to be filled with rainbows!

First up we have this beautiful selection of Anchor perle 8 cotton:

Now there are 50 colours here and I had great fun organising them into a rainbow.  I'm also rather excited to start hand quilting with them on my new rainbow quilt (see further in this post).  I bought so many because they were £21 (incl p&p) from this seller on Ebay that's based in London.

Having all these colours around along with other patinbox style quilts I've seen on the blog-o-sphere (sorry I can't remember who did the wonderful one for her teenage son with the apple logo!), all these made me think that I wanted to try and make my own little version.

My sketch for the quilt...

I was so excited by this project that I went through my stash straight-away to decide which fabrics would go where.  I wanted it to be mostly solid colours with just a few dots or tone on tone prints to complete the paintbox effect.

Here it is a-waiting the sashing and border, which will be done in Kona solids Ash and then I think I'll get to work with the Perle 8 doing a simple design.  Haven't figured out the design yet but there's time.

Can you spot which pattern is which?

Now I'm preparing to head to Vancouver in the morning for a working holiday, so will be forced to leave my quilting at home.  Instead I'm taking some knitting which will be in time a lace shawl using this beautiful Jade Green yarn.

It took ages to wind it from the skein into a ball.  At times like that I think perhaps I should experiment with having a yarn winder...