I finally got to grips with my alternate blocks and finished the first row. I didn’t have much in the way of brown but lots of mauve and lavender scraps which are good companions for purple so in they went!
I have made lots of four patches in orange, red, pink and yellow so it looks like I will be starting at the opposite end and eventually meet in the middle – only two more blocks to make. The other good thing is making so many little blocks I have also progressed very well on my Tumbler Challenge; all tumblers are in fours at least and some are now joined into eights. I don’t think it will take much longer to finish that quilt – so I should have two by the end of the year
Four more blocks completed and on the line – not far behind the rest of the group considering I started in August and not January. It was quite breezy but I managed to get a few shots in between gusts
I returned to the Whirling Geese block and used darker blues, as my mid-blue version was a bit too light. I used the inner block from the orange month to do a second mid-blue block too which is a Twirling Four Patch. It’s more like a pinwheel than the block that is called a pinwheel!
I finished the yellows too. Monkey Wrench is in the original list, however, the second paler block should have been Air Castle but I substituted this block whose name escapes me.
As you can see it is another lovely sunny day which is a welcome return after the last few days which have been cold and grey
Next job on the list was chain piecing the squares I had prepared earlier in the week for the alternate blocks
All the indigo, pink, red, yellow and orange are now in little four or two patches. The good thing about all this piecing is the amount of tumblers that were sewn together too. All are at the very least paired up and about half of those are now in fours. It’s surprising how quickly this Leaders and Enders project is going. It may even be finished at the same time as the Rainbow Scrap Challenge! Now all I need to do is keep up with the Quilting From Little Things and they will all be wrapped up by the end of the year – nearly forgot the Global Quilting Project! Just waiting for one more block and then assembly can begin. Perhaps I will have three full-sized quilts for New Year
What does; Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain and Every hunter Wishes To Know Where The Pheasant Sits have in common?
Answer;
They are both mnemonics to remember the order of the colours of the rainbow using the capital letter of each word. For English speakers this is; Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet (ROY GB IV is another way to remember)
For Russian speakers this is; red, orange, yellow, green, SKY BLUE, BLUE, violet
In Russian sky blue or light blue is perceived as a separate colour from blue, which seems odd to us but then we have a colour pink – which is really a tint of red. A tint is made when you add white to a colour (light blue is a tint too) A shade is made by adding black
Just to shake up the rainbow even more, when Sir Isaac Newton used a prism to break up white light he added indigo for occult reasons and it is a shade of blue. That is why modern renditions of the rainbow – including the Gay Pride Banner and Dark Side of the Moon album cover for Pink Floyd – have only six colours.
A very busy day on Friday. Finished four more blocks for the RSC15 and cut squares for the alternate blocks in yellow, orange and red. Posted my two tulip blocks for the Block Lotto and tidied the sewing room. Got a phone call to say that I am through to the second round of interviews for a job at Little Havens charity shop – fingers crossed!
My sewing room is too small so I am spreading out into the hall. It should be a bit more thread free as I made another fabric pot on Friday too, for all those little threads and clippings – my other one lives in the hall on an Ikea bookcase which has become my cutting table. It’s a bit low but I think adding castors (the locking kind) will raise it up high enough to save my back.
It might be October but the weather has been wonderful; warm and sunny with a slight mist this morning just to remind you that it is Autumn.
Do you remember a certain singer who decided that a symbol would represent him instead of a name? Well that’s how I remembered him after twisting the title of one of his songs. Now that’s what I think of this block. I just kept getting it wrong and the final product is wrong, but I like it the way it is. Nothing to do with the instructions, they were fine, but I have a bad habit of making things late at night when I should go to bed. I am tired and I make mistakes, fortunately it’s not brain surgery!
It was supposed to be Carrie Nation but I completely forgot to add a third purple to the small squares which are supposed to run through the middle, so I played around with the arrangement and made this instead. Not so much Carrie Nation as Frustration!
I was multi-tasking and making more than one block so I could chain piece but things went awry, never mind the end result is going in the final quilt anyway!
Another purple block still to be made yet. Watch this space
What a boring title LOL I hope the blocks aren’t boring though! As usual I used as many different fabrics as I could. Traditionally a churn dash block is made in two fabrics, I used seven but this is a scrap challenge quilt so I only had small amounts of a couple of them. Now they are even smaller!
I love the little mini sawtooth star inside the bigger one. The greens for this block are completely different to the previous one; it’s not until you put them together that you can see how much variety there is in one colour.
Now I have a third green block to make. The flying geese are ready and waiting for the inner block but I haven’t decided which one to do. Angela has a lot of choice over at So Scrappy which you can visit HERE
Catching up with the sawtooth stars, although the alternating blocks are still to be tackled!
We associate pink with girls ( in the West) but it was not always so as this article by Polly Curtis writing for the Guardian, points out;
“Interestingly Goldacre quotes in the same piece newspaper articles from the earlier part of the 20th century in which mothers were encouraged to dress their boys in pink and girls in blue, proof he says that clothing tastes change over time. He writes:
Back in the days when ladies had a home journal (in 1918) the Ladies’ Home Journal wrote: “There has been a great diversity of opinion on the subject, but the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger colour is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”
The Sunday Sentinel in 1914 told American mothers: “If you like the colour note on the little one’s garments, use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention.”
You can find the full article HERE and there are some other interesting points about stereotyping for toy preference.
My mother wasn’t one for sticking to the stereotypes; I almost exclusively wore blue, one of my sisters had a train set and none of us were particularly interested in dolls. My main interest was making them clothes rather than ‘make-believe’ that they were alive.
I think things are actually worse today – Lego is a prime example – once advertised in the 70 and 80s as a toy for children, now it is segregated into ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ sets.
Compare their philosophy and old adverts to the ‘modern’ ones Here A huge step backwards and making 5 year old girls worry about their appearance rather than just playing with toys is a disgrace
Completed three blocks for the RSC15 but not all of them have worked out the way I wanted. Actually they are not even meant to be blue but one light blue and two turquoise. I have one more light blue to do
Here they are, can you spot the mistake 😦
The light blue looks the same as the turquoise ones! – it’s the one on the right of ‘whirling geese’ I think the main problem is the colour of the geese on the outside. Perhaps a little reverse sewing and substitution is called for, like this –
Not sure I like the square in the middle or white geese either! This is the first block that I haven’t really liked much since starting this project so I think it’s best if I put it to one side and carry on with the other colours for now and hope things turn out a bit better!
There are three orange blocks for this section, yesterday I posted the ‘birds in flight’ block and it’s significance. The two blocks today have no significance other than I wanted something simple.
Firstly, a nine patch made from Happy-go-Lucky candy squares by Bonnie and Camille for Moda. I bought these at The Quilters and Embroiderers Store, Brisbane. Camille Roskelly was giving a talk and I bought her book Simply Retro and a few packs of these candy squares. Loved her talk and the quilts she brought with her!
Secondly, another simple patch which I made up. I don’t think it is an old block, at least I couldn’t find it. I was trying to think of a name. As it is an easy variation of a nine patch I thought Easy Kate but that sounds like it is named after a strumpet ha ha. Kate in the corner sounds like a naughty child so I’ll leave it as a nine-patch variation which sounds boring but accurate
The little flower in the middle is from ‘Sweet Things’ by Holly Holderman for Lake House Dry Goods and has the cutest colour chart on the selvedge of cupcakes instead of the usual dots. Another scrap from a scrap bag bought on EBay
Ode to Autumn; ‘Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness’…John Keats.
September’s colour is orange which is very appropriate for those of us in the Northern hemisphere as the trees will soon start their yearly change of clothes before flinging them off altogether.
The blackberries are ripening in the hedgerow in Essex so last Saturday we took the grand-daughters to the nature reserve to go blackberry picking. We should have taken a walking stick to pull down the highest runners which tantalised us with the choicest berries, even so we still managed to pick about three kilos in a couple of hours. That doesn’t include the ones the girls ate!
There were lots of different plants to see; instructions on which ones to avoid – like deadly nightshade, and birds intent on eating the blackberries that we were picking. When we were nearly finished we came to a fork in the path and I started down the left-hand side but my other half, who knew the woods better then me, called me to go right. How glad I am that we did. As we examined one bush he saw a bird fluttering in a particularly dense patch and realise it was trapped! I couldn’t see it at first and when I did I was sickened to see it hanging upside-down, desperately trying to free itself from the thorns
‘I think it’s leg is broken’ he said.
I cringed as I have seen the translucent broken bones in the leg of another bird years ago and didn’t want to see it again but the bird needed rescuing and taking to the Wildlife trust centre. He pushed the tangled thorny runners aside and I reached in through the briars and put my hand around it’s frail, trembling little body. He snapped off the piece that held the bird so I was able to pull it out.
I couldn’t look as he gently pulled the plant apart to free the bird. As he did so the frantic fluttering stopped and the bird waited motionless in my hand; the quivering of it’s heart the only sign that it was still alive. I ventured a look and was relieved to see that it’s leg wasn’t broken after all.
Once it was free, the bird began to struggle again; we called the girls to come and see but only the oldest was quick enough to see the bird as I opened my hand to let it go. It disappeared in seconds and we were all glad that we had taken the right path!
thecraftyyak 