I have followed Angela’s blog for several years and wondered about playing along but always got swallowed up by other projects. This year I am determined to create with more intention and make some projects I really want to make. I’m not getting any younger and need to accomplish some goals. So this is my year for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge! January is green and although she asked us to focus on the lights & brights, my blocks have all the greens.
These green string blocks are inspired by a quilt from Angela, the host of the RSC2020. I saw this a long time ago and have always wanted to make one. I started making a few last year as L&E’s and this is the year to finish it up. So I finished the necessary greens for my layout of the quilt I’m calling Diamond Strings. I have fallen in love with sewing string blocks!
Tumbling Strings is inspired by a selvage quilt I saw by Cathy and it’s my first tumbler quilt, so that’s fun. I’m alternating string tumblers with full scrap tumblers. Here are the two green rows.
I have been wanting to make some stairsteps blocks for a while & when I saw the layout by Julie I knew I had found my project. So thanks to her for the design inspiration. I will be making blocks in various colors for Rainbow Stairsteps this year. I love the faux Irish Chain effect of this layout.
These square-in-square blocks are from a kit I purchased long ago that has been lingering in my to-do bin. It’s Sun Print 2016 by Alison Glass. The kit came with the Alison Glass colored prints and I am using my own stash for the black on white backgrounds. The blocks are set in spectrum order so this challenge seemed a perfect motivation to get it out and do it. Here are January’s greens.
These crazy patch blocks will be cut into small blocks & used to create End of the Rainbow from Melissa Correy’s Irish Chain Quilts book. Also one of my long-time wish list quilts, so I’m digging into it a little at a time.
And finally, a kind of L&E, extra project. These checkerboard blocks will end up in a quilt someday. I need more greens and also lots of others, but I’m not stressing about getting this one done this year. I’m just throwing 4-patches in the machine & bordering them as I get done and when I get a pile, I’ll evaluate where I’m at & how many more I need to make in what colors.
So that’s green January. It took me two weeks to get these done, so now I have two more weeks of the month to work on other necessary projects before embarking on February’s color.
I’ve been working on this quilt for a long time, in that I’ve been slowly playing with fabric scraps to construct these “made fabric” squares. They were pieced together randomly from my ‘tiny scrap’ bin and when a section got large enough, I trimmed it into a 6″ finished square. When I had enough constructed, I set them on point using the setting pattern for the 1920’s Farmer’s Wife quilt that my quilt group is working on, and voila! A craaazzzzy quilt. I made a wonky, crazy pieced backing and made a totally random scrappy binding from pieces of leftover binding from other quilts. I quilted it myself on my home machine with a free-style crazy quilting pattern of spirals in the squares and loops in between. It’s totally scrappy and was fun to make. The only problem is that with all those biases, it doesn’t square up perfectly. But this was an experiment and it’s made to be loved and used, so whoever gets it can just use it to death, and it’s OK.
I named this quilt “Curvy Cabins” and took a class to learn this curved piecing technique in September of 2017 at Quilt Etc. in Sandy. I cut out all the pieces before the class, then sewed up two blocks during the class to learn the technique. My instructor helped me get all the pieces for the remaining blocks sorted out into piles so that I just had to start sewing blocks at home. It went together quite quickly and then I worked on the curved seams. I finished the top and took it back to Quilt Etc. for quilting on Halloween and got it back from them just before New Year’s. So I got the binding almost sewed on in 2017 and finished the last yard of hand-sewing it down in early May because I set it aside and worked on other things. 
