Purple Placemat

In honor of June's color -- purple -- I did manage to make a placemat-of-the-month. I realized that I have hardly any purple (relatively speaking) in pieces larger than scrap size...so no noodle quilt this month. I used the Accu-cut machine to cut these little triangles, then sewed them together without too much attention to matching points. A quick, thick meander this morning to quilt it up, and I finished sewing the binding down today while the boys were in their art class. I sat in the cafe at the New Britain Museum of American Art (if you haven't visited, you're missing out) and had a wonderful conversation with the wife of one of the museum's trustees. What a delightful way to spend the afternoon!

June Free-Motion Practice

I dutifully cut my purple scraps into the block that I've been using for free-motion practice. This particular block is not pretty - there's too much variety in the purples and I wasn't careful about separating blue-violets from red-violets. The quilting, however, came out spectacularly! It's very tightly quilted, and I tried a variety of repetitive pattern according to this month's Free-Motion Challenge tutorial. The photos give decent detail. (I just found a library book with some good info about photographing handcrafts; I'm hoping my skills in this area will develop a little.)

Too much purple variety. Nice fabrics, but they don't play well together.

I started with a small-scall checkerboard...

...added some tight echoing, meandering...

...and finished with some pebbles (those took a while!) and some circle & square spirals along the edges.

June color challenge

I managed to whip together a little something for this month's Color Palette challenge. The inspiration photo was beautiful, and just this weekend I realized that I have the absolutely perfect fabric to match this palette:

Seriously - could there be any single fabric MORE perfect for this palette??

This delight has been in my stash for years - my husband wears a terrific summer shirt from this fabric, and I have been saving the remaining yardage for a "one-block wonder" kaleidoscoping quilt. Obviously I don't have time to complete that project in the two days remaining in June, but I also found a bag of six inch circles that I cut from this fabric for some mysterious quite-unremembered reason. I used a few of those to make a cute little coin purse.

Coin purse (from "Fabulous Fat Quarter Bags")

I don't think I mentioned the exciting news that my project for last month was drawn (randomly) as the winner, for which I received some beautiful hand-dyed fat quarters from Vicki Welsh. Thank you so much, Judy and Vicki, for organizing this terrific project - it has been a real skill builder for me!

Stitchery on the road

To pass the time on our drive to South Carolina, I did a little English paper-piecing using a fun tile pattern from the Jinny Beyer book I got for Christmas last year. The colors were selected for the May Color Palette Challenge.

May 2012 Color Palette Challenge photo

I started with some spot-on perfect fabric that I had in my Strategic Reserves (used as the hexagons), and added a few bright batiks and some white for the background triangles. Although I wish the yellow batik squares were bright orange instead, I really like this blockless tiling pattern. I am considering making one of these in slightly larger scraps, with a pale neutral hexagon as the background, and unplanned darks as the squares and triangles (in which case, I think the pattern is called "Jack's Chain").

English paper piecing! Each seam is 2" long.

I'm really looking forward to June's challenge...another great photo:

June's Color Palette Challenge photo