Improv fun and scraps

I finished off the last of the twelve blocks for Daughter #1’s Christmas Quilt this morning. Does that sound just a little too soon to you? It does to me too, but I plan to gift a lot of quilts this Christmas, and I want as many as possible to be quilts that I want to make, and that I enjoy making, so that means starting early. I will make as many as possible either playing with colour schemes (e.g. purple), or improv quilts.

There is no good way of getting a photo of these blocks at the moment, due to this….

…what my sewing room looks like from the other side of the cutting table. On the opposite side of the table I have a large ironing table, which I have to shift to reach my design wall.

The green door actually leads into the garage, but is never used, the door that is. The garage is used to store stuff. Our cars sit out in the elements, which might explain the rust, and lichen (no kidding, it rains here an awful lot).

My next task is to sort the pile of fabric and put it away. I do like a tidy work surface to play in.

Among the pile is the completed Midnight at the Oasis quilt, but it is far too windy for any outside shots today. The house is shuddering hard enough that it almost feels like small earthquakes. I’ve checked Geonet, but there haven’t been any recent earthquakes, so it’s just wind gusts.

I also started another longer term scrap project today, after taking Cheryl Arkison’s Improv Quilting class, which I mentioned in another post.

I gathered all my purple scraps from the above quilt and made a slab, which will end up as a rainbow scrap quilt for Daughter #2 for Christmas.

I read the instructions in Cheryl’s book very carefully, at least until step 2, then just started joining fabric scraps together. As a result, my finished product looks nothing like hers does. Never mind, I got rid of some scraps, which was the point of the exercise. At the moment the slab is about 19 inches, but I have room to trim, if need be.

Next is putting away that pile of fabric, and fossicking around for some black fabric to use as sashing on the purple quilts. I received some useful comments after the last post, that black would make the purples “sing”, so it’s advice I shall follow.

Linking up with Mrs Sew and Sow for Scraptastic Tuesday