playing all over

I made a quilt last decade for some friends that started with some gorgeous hand-dyed fabric. I love working with hand-dyed fabric because of the subtle variations in the color saturation. I don't love it enough to make any. I've tried and it's too messy an operation for me. I had a steady supplier in those days and made several quilts with her fabric, but she's moved on to other pursuits. I love her fabric so much that I want to use it all up completely, down to the 1.5 inch squares. I still have a big bag of fabric left from the last purchase.

Quilts made from scraps, while very traditional, can be ugly. One has to be careful to make an interesting pattern and use fabrics that have some relation to each other. In this case, the fabric was already chosen to mesh together, but the design had to be new. There is not much point to making (yet another) quilt with plain squares of fabric sewn together. I love circles set in squares, but even that motif can get old. I decided to cut these and use the seams to switch colors. There's another layer of small circles that will be added in the centers. I'll post some finished blocks next.

I'm playing with the last of this bag of yellows, oranges and pinks. I added some greys to wake up the monotony a bit. I cut out and basted two small (40" x 40") block-based quilts last week and am steadily doing the appliqué, a few blocks a day. One quilt is made with circles, the other has some spikes. The bag now contains 1/4 yard each of a light pink and a light yellow and a bunch of really tiny pieces of the other hues. I'm not sure what those will turn into, but I'll finish these first.

Here's FLTQ in full assembly mode with the circle quilt in progress, all over the cabin.

I wanted to play with the intersection of the seam lines. Each block is pieced randomly, so the circles are off-center.