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

Table topper: Check

Finished the table topper for my mother's friend! The embroidery in the middle is a very elegant design, and it stitched out beautifully -- once again, I'm very satisfied with the folks at Urban Threads.

http://www.urbanthreads.com/product_details?product_id=3742&category_id=6

Odds & Ends

Working on a few ongoing projects...

Here are the yellow (yay!) squares for the Rainbow Challenge project I'm working on, along with May's Free-Motion Challenge motif. I like the concept of the "double stipple" but I probably should have practiced on paper a bit more first. It's OK, but I think this pattern could be really jazzed up with some loops or leaves crossing the first wide stipple. Also, it's harder to do a large-scale stipple than a small-scale, because I really have to move my arms to get those large movements across the piece. Gotta practice that some more.

Also, I finally finished one of the April blocks for the Craftsy block of the month. (I'll get caught up on all of these in June.) I liked the English paper piecing method so much that I'm drafting some paper templates for Penrose tiles. Many thanks to Karen for showing me how to invisibly applique these hexes onto the background!

Still to finish this week: Mom's table topper (top is stitched, just needs flannel back & a bit of quilting), architecture challenge, and Color Palette Challenge project. Plus, I need to prepare something to take on vacation with me.

Bones

My 10-year-old's birthday gift:

Love dem bones!