Some Summertime Ideas

 As I'm sure I've mentioned before, ideas of novelty quilts seem to come in bunches.  Discovering that one of my favorite pattern designers had a couple of books I had missed got my creative engines going again.  I discussed the fun secondary designs in my last blog post.  Here are those two finished tops along with a couple of others.  

This pattern is called Windmills from Kim Brackett's book Scrap-Basket Strips and Squares.  The hardest part of this quilt was remembering which corner to put the white triangle.  I have 4 blocks that spin the wrong say in my scrap basket now.  I tried constructing that corner triangle a little differently than I usually do.  Rather than sewing on the triangle then trimming the waste from the rectangle, I trimmed the small triangle away first.  Then I sewed the white triangle using a 1/4" seam on the bias.  It worked pretty well as long as I remembered to cut all the rectangles with the right side up.  My windmills spin the opposite way from the book because I cut from the backside.  Oh well.  A good reminder that rectangles are NOT reversible.  The layout was very critical on this one.  I'm proud to say I only had to resew one block.  My numbered flannel flags were lifesavers.

This quilt, also from the same book, had a similar challenge  - you have to sew those triangles on the same corners EVERY TIME.  But by this time I was paying attention and put a sample block right in front of my machine as a reminder.  Since the color placement was random, this quilt went together very fast.  I did put them up on the wall and try to scatter the different colors - planned random.

This quilt is from another one of Kim Brackett's books, Scrap-basket surprises.    Initially I was going to use black in the corners but it felt like the contrast was too harsh, so I used a dark gray tone on tone instead.

This pattern also uses 2" strips and 2" squares, but the pattern is by Cluck Cluck sew, called Shortcake #122.  It was fun to use up a bunch of left over squares in the 9 patch section.

None of these have borders yet.  They are hanging in the closet aging a bit until I know what I'm going to do with them.

This last one isn't a novelty quilt, but since I've been running on about Kim Brackett, it seems appropriate to put it here.  This is another of her patterns from Scrap-basket surprises, called Bali Sea Star.  I had decided to use up some of the pre-cut 2.5" strips I had in my stash.  This quilt officially used up the last of the black & white strips given to me by my cousin (I think this is the 3rd quilt I've used them).  The bright strips were a door prize from the AZ retreat from years ago.  This quilt is for me, just for fun.  And I did enjoy it, except for how badly those strips had raveled after being handled so much for years.  

I was especially pleased with how the binding turned out - I've had this fabric in my stash for years and it fit perfectly for this quilt.