Yay for Thursday Morning!

Thursday morning is usually sewing morning and look what I’ve been doing today! I won the new book lottery at quilt club last Saturday and my prize was the chance to be the first to take home Collaborative Quilting by Freddy Moran & Gwen Marston from our club library. This is a great book – both authors preach my style quilting and its very inspiring. Freddy loves bright colours with black and white to give zing and Gwen loves improvisation in design, and together they have been designing on the design wall from ready made blocks and strips that they call The Parts Department. They preach “if its too big, cut it smaller, if its too small add a bit”. Yeah! I really relate to that!

I had the basket weave square of this quilt already lying around and it seemed to fit Freddy’s colour scheme. I decided to make some of the blocks from their Parts Department section just as a reference for myself really as I will need to take this book back next month. So I studied the basket weave piece and decided to carry on with the main colours of orange and yellow/orange and black and brown/black with just touches of purple and green. I made the purple and green four patches and then cut orange ¼ square triangles as they recommend to set the blocks on point. I cut them a little too large but after I had sewn them on the four patches I decided that I liked the way they now floated in a sea of orange – a happy accident. But I hadn’t made enough to turn the corner, and anyway, Gwen says don’t worry about turning corners, just cut the border off in the middle of a block if you need to so I did! But I needed something for the corner so I made the black and orange pinwheel – isn’t it stunning?

But, fun as it was, I really don’t have time to do any more of their blocks so I made the brown and orange four squares to break up some long strips of other fabrics to make borders to complete the quilt. I’ve almost finished playing with the placement of them now. What do you think?

We’re going overseas later this year and this will be a gift for our hosts at one place we visit. I was going to make them something from New Zealand fabric but I might just put that fabric on the back of this now as while I think its pretty special and deserves to be gifted to the right people its VERY ORANGE and needs people who can appreciate an Orange Explosion!