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...

A Spring Quilty Adventure

I'm linking up to Quilt Story for there Fabric Tuesdays.  Be sure to look at some of the other wonderful projects that are out there.  I hope they won't mind that this is a WIP (work in progress).  It's just it's the most on a single project I've ever done in one day and I'm really excited with how it's coming along and would love to have some feedback.

Now...

Last weekend I went to visit my dear friend Kirsty (her blog = Fatty Unbound) in Brighton for some quality girlie catch up time, oodles of crafting and lots of pootling.  There was even time for an ice cream on the beach!

Now Kirsty isn't a quilter but when I'd found the shop Quilty Pleasures online. I knew I wanted to visit, as I'd never been to a *just* modern quilting shop before.  Kirsty was happy to pander to my crafting desires as we tend to encourage each other with our various crafts.  Anyways whilst I was there, I fell in love with the Hideaway line by Lauren and Jessi Jung. I bought myself a charm pack and 0.75m of the circles on snow.  Now despite this small purchase of the line (I keep wondering why I didn't go for the layer cake), I decided that I wanted to make myself a lap quilt using these fabrics.  There was no specific date or timeline to work on this project because I have several other things on the go.  But... yesterday was so perfectly spring-like, the colours in the fabric spoke to me and inspiration struck.

A view of the tree that is in front of my kitchen window.  It makes washing up feel less of a chore.

I decided to take this inspiration and see what would happen.  I didn't plan. I didn't design.  I just pulled out some co-ordinating solids (Kona Robin's Egg Blue and Lemon, plus Klona grass green and white) and wanted to see what would happen when I let myself loose with the blocks and fabric.  It's a first for me.  Here are a few progress shots that show the beginning of the day (afternoon):

Testing out fabric combinations and playing.

Blocks beginning to form

From these two photos it is difficult to tell how the project will look once the blocks are formed, sashing put in place and the colours allowed to settle together.  However I did take a few more photos of the blocks laid out in various layout ideas: 

Several blocks laid out on top of the backing fabric

However the above photo was taken before my quilting mission was finished.  I ended the day of 8+ hours of cutting & sewing with 14 blocks made (each = 8"), a design for the rest of the quilt, the backing figured out and it was all coming together happily.  Before I launch into sewing all the pieces together I laid them out on my bed (apologies for the wrinkled duvet!) and I think I'm happy with how it looks:

Now I've just another 6 more blocks to make to go along the top and bottom of the quilt.  These will be like the one that sits on its own with the 4 little squares in it.  Simple design but oh so fun.  The sashing will be bands of the solids and then a border in the Hideaway Egg.  Hurrah!

FYI:

- I've changed the comments from Disqus back to Blogger, so I can reply to people via email.  This does mean that I've just lost a chunk of comments.

The First Quilt Blocks...

As yesterday saw the cutting out of the squares for my four large corner quilt blocks, today came the piecing.  I've decided on a simple 9 patch block design, as I feel that it shows off the fabrics in the best way.  I'm using two patterned fabrics (blue whales and then multi-animals - both Eleanor Grosz), so on the top 2 blocks will have the whales running as a frame and the bottom two blocks it will be the other way round. The spots are a Kaffe Fasset range that I felt gave a nice bold effect with the blue and greens showing up quite prominently.

This is the 3-whales colourway.

This is the multi-animals colourway.  Apologies for the shadow, that was me taking the photo in my kitchen.

The remainder of the quilt will involve some applique (I think), a simple border style (log-cabin block inspired) and oodles of cream.  I think this is going to need quite an interesting binding to finish the project off with style.  Fortunately I'm a little way off from that point.  I'm also plotting what sort of quilting style to do but again there's time...