Quilt tops I'm playing with....

Even though I have big quilts to quilt, and deadlines to meet, I still want to play and make quilt tops! First up, is this little quilt from Kim Deihl's book "simple Blessings". She shows it warm and country with plaids; I've made it with charm squares from Eleanor Burns' new line of Victory Quilt fabrics - these are not colours I usually use!

This shows the centre, and the inner border and outer border fabrics I've chosen, along with the some of the applique shapes. In a recent Quitlers Newsletter, they have a "workshop" section where a quilter named Kerrilyn Gavin quilts her applique blocks first, with grid quilting, then she applies the fusible appliques, and sews them with monofilament thread. I'm thinking of doing that with this little quilt and see how it turns out. This all got started because of two reasons - first, remember that little quilt I made a couple of months ago from Bits and Pieces? I had planned on making it bigger by using the leftover appliques from the Strippy Basket and Stars, and thought the "quilt first, applique second" technique might work out pretty well - and I wanted to try it first to see how it looks; second, I signed up for a preview club from Benartex fabrics - great deal! - $25 for a year of mailings of their new fabric lines in charm square size - this gives me the opportunity to play with colours and designs that I might not normally be drawn to. I've been kind of poking around my sewing room to see what is hidden and my charm square box is quite full with all kinds of stuff - I saw the Victory Quilts charms and away my mind went!


Here's another quilt top I think I'll be finishing sometime this winter or fall. It started out as a block of the month called Somewhere in Time from www.blockcentral.com. I've kind of lost interest in it, and I had a huge stash of fabric in there that I knew could likely be used somewhere else - so these are the five blocks I've done so far, along with the border fabric and an assortment of others -





With the help of Terry Martin's book, "Wonder Blocks" - I'm thinking of turning it into this:

I'm hoping it doesn't turn out quite so green and gold, but there's only so much colouring and drawing you want to do on EQ6. It won't take me long to cut up the fabrics for the wonder blocks, then back in the drawer they'll go for another day :)

Four more sections and two more corners of stippling still to go - I think I'll try to do one more today -