All Squared Away!

Lately, in my sewing room, I kept bumping into a little basket of leftover 1 1/2" squares. I think they were trying to tell me something. So I took the basket and a few small design boards to my sewing machine to piece some simple little one-patch quilts. This is what happened.

Most all of these are from a basket of squares and a few strips from my scrap baskets. Five of them are quilted and the binding is sewn on and pinned to the other side. The sixth one is still a flimsy.

I started with this little piece--just randomly alternating light and dark squares, blurring the lines now and then with some medium values. I am always happy making scrappy quilts. What I struggle to make are two-color quilts. I'm always throwing in another color or two (or more).

So after making this, I sorted the remaining squares into piles, by color. Then I paired off the piles of colors and challenged myself to make some little two-color pieces.

Recently I had seen a red and brown quilt on another blog and it has stayed on my mind ever since. So it was my first two-color experiment.
So far, so good. No extra colors crept in. So I moved on.
Red had been the largest pile, so there were still plenty leftover to pair with the pile of greens.

Blue and gold are a classic combo, to me. Like sunlight glinting on water, it is a soothing pairing.

I really should have dead-headed the little African Violet plant, or chosen one with no dead blooms, before taking this photo, but I didn't even notice until the photo was on the screen.
(Okay, I have a confession to make. To get truer colors in photos I take indoors at night, I take them in a dark room with a flash. I often don't really see what the photo looks like until I upload it.)
I am not a big fan of pink, but I love the classic combo of CW pinks and browns.

This quilt is where I got off track. Not only did I add a third color, but I also deviated from the one-patch format, and I had to leave the scrap baskets to find that lovely Jo Morton gold fabric the four-patch blocks seemed to be asking for.

Since Gidget was warmed up quilting these little pieces, I put her to work on something I should have had quilted long ago.

This is the baby quilt I made from the block swap I did with Maureen last summer. I did a rope pattern in the red border and put a large stipple on the rest of the quilt. It is a baby quilt, after all, and will see lots of wear and tear.

I finally settled on a soft green for the sashing in my Garden Maze setting, after auditioning all suggested options. I think it is a nice variation from the simple sashing and cornerstones.

I can promise you there won't be this much to share next time. I was making up for 3 weeks of not quilting at all!

BTW, the winner of my drawing was Kathy, who blogs at Empty Nest But Full Heart. Congrats, Kathy. 

Until next time, Janet O.