First finishes since February

Two finishes over the weekend!
First is a little 12 inch mini for Easter.  My neighbor, who is a lovely Greek lady (and makes the best home made baklava), celebrated Orthodox Easter this weekend.  So I think I can still say I finished in time for Easter. I just had to hand sew the binding in the car on the way to the lake.

Easter with my Peeps - mini 12 inch square

A close-up for brighter colors.

The other quilt that had binding hand stitched on this week was a UFO!  I started Shoo Fly Pie in April 2012 as part of a color challenge.  We were challenged to make a quilt from colors from a posted photograph, colors we would not normally use together.

I had a very busy small print floral that I loved, but it never was right for anything!  It had all the right colors in it for this challenge.  It was still too busy for me at first, and I started and stopped, ripped out and re-sewed again to make half dark and half light. I was stuck for a while until my sister suggested adding the navy blue blocks to anchor the colors.  It was just what this quilt needed!  Finally, this is the result.

Shoo Fly Pie quilted tablecloth 51 inches square

I can't make a shoo fly block without humming the song "Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy."  My mother used to sing that all the time in the kitchen.  I was thinking of her, and her home made pies, when I made the pie in the center. The crust is a wide tan rick-rack top-stitched over the seam of the drunkard's path blocks.  I used a lightweight summer cotton blanket for backing and plan to use this quilt as a tablecloth up at the lake.  Especially when we're serving pie!

March Color Challenge: Ravel's Bolero

Sometimes a quilt just seems to have a personality of it's own and creates itself.  That seemed to happen with my March Color Palette quilt.  When Vicki Welsh first posted the colors from Bilboa I did a search to see just what that was, and hoped for inspiration.  The search engine insisted I meant Bilbao, Spain and showed lovely photos of that area as a vacation spot. The heavy reds and blacks in the palette did remind me of the Colonial Spanish decor popular in the 1970's.  So apparently this quilt wanted to have an old Spanish flavor.  I only had one gold fabric piece on hand in the color palette and it's black filigree pattern reminded me of the wrought iron work of a Spanish villa. 

As I played around with block placement, the four blocks with music on them ended up in the center of the quilt.  Lo and behold! as I was cleaning out some boxes this week I found some more of that fabric, which I then used for the outer border.  So, Music was apparently also going to be a major theme to the quilt.  Just to make sure I was getting the message, the music to Ravel's "Bolero" ran through my head most of the week.  So, the quilt has been named Ravels Bolero 2012, and has a bright yellow fleece backing and marigold yellow binding.  It's currently quilted with stitch-in-the ditch, but I will probably add more quilting.  It will be a good quilt for practicing free motion quilting, as I'm just a beginner at that.