2018 Color Coded Reading Challenge
This was my sixth year for this challenge and I continue to enjoy it as hosted by Bev at My Reader’s Block. I tried to read my own books but half ended up being library books because I just couldn’t find anything in my stacks.
Rules: Read nine books in the following categories during 2018, with the required color in the title or covering most of the cover.
The Color:
- “Blue” The Indigo Notebook (Notebook #1), Laura Resau
- “Red” A Study in Scarlet Women (Lady Sherlock, #1), Sherry Thomas
- “Yellow” My Italian Bulldozer, Alexander McCall Smith (cover)
- “Green” The Jade Notebook (Notebook #3), Laura Resau
- “Brown” Hero at the Fall (Rebel of the Sands #3), Alwyn Hamilton (cover)
- “Black” Agnes Grey, Anne Brontë
- “White” Between Shades of Gray, Ruta Sepetys (cover)
- Any other color The Color Purple, Alice Walker
- Word that implies color Calico Captive by Elizabeth George Speare
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. 
