On the Design Wall

I swear I don't know where the time goes. The color of the month for May for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge was green, and I finished up my green ribbon this morning. I stayed mostly on the cool side of green; and since green will appear in my quilt more than once, I set aside a pile of warmer greens for future use.

This green ribbon is adjacent to the blue one and is also the last one on the right side of the quilt, so there are plain squares at the edge that make a border on that side of the quilt. I'm getting a little more daring with multicolor prints in these ribbons because it seems to be more interesting than plain tone on tones.

See what others are working on here.

I also finished up the yellow Dakota Farmer blocks from last year's RSC and started sewing some of the blocks together. This block was from Bonnie Hunter's "Addicted to Scraps" column in Quiltmaker magazine, and she has a layout for it on her blog. I just realized this morning, looking at the picture, that there's a border of 3" dark blue half square triangles around the whole quilt. Not sure yet if I'll actually add that border, but probably. Perhaps it will look unfinished otherwise.

Orange is the last color that goes in the quilt, and I've started cutting for those. All throughout the quilt, I tried to use background prints that were white or off-white with motifs matching the same color as the stars and not repeat them more than twice. I've managed to pull that off so far, but I just don't have enough background prints with orange in them to make this last batch of seven blocks work that way. Sue Nichols uses all those fancy embroidery stitches built into her machine to create her own backgrounds, so I might try that with a few of mine. Coincidentally there's an article in the Quiltmaker magazine that just hit the newsstands with the very same idea.

I have a little bit more quilting to do on the Cascadia quilt. I'm just doing some quilting in the ditch as it doesn't really need much to hold the layers together. Sometimes I wish I had time to do some hand quilting, but I'd never get it done. Besides I'm not sure I could hand quilt without a hoop, and this little quilt measures about 16" x 17".

This colorful fellow showed up at the bird feeder the other day. I was very surprised to see a pair of Baltimore Orioles at the feeder last fall, and evidently they've come back. The photo doesn't do that gorgeous orange color justice.