Group challenges

Well hello there! I didn't mean to take a break but somehow I did. I blame it on a slightly dismal end to KCWC (more on that later) and getting stuck in to painting the kitchen. But along with that I was slowly working away on a couple of challenges we set ourselves at our last modern quilt group meeting at The Little Craft Store (highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't been, 7-9pm first Monday of the month at the shop in Pt. Chev). The first one was to make a 'mug rug' in solids (what's wrong with saying coaster, does it have to have a ridiculous name just to make it sound less nana or something?), up to an A4 size. The second, which I'll blog when I've finished the binding, was to do a block you didn't particularly like in colours you don't particularly like. What do you think mine was?

I've been wanting to try half-square triangles for awhile now, so I thought I'd give those a go, but of course this being my first time I had to do them quite small. Not that they're really difficult or anything but I like to make things hard on myself and burn my fingers with the iron while pressing them. I wanted to do a gradation from one colour to another and I had this idea in my head. I didn't have quite the right solids but they weren't too bad. The yellow is a bit out of place, but I didn't have an inbetween orange and yellow colour. They grade from a medium red (they all look much darker in this photo) to a peachy pink, to salmon, to orange and then to lightish yellow.




After I laid them all out I wasn't that thrilled with the sheer regularity of it all, it was too...clinical or sterile or something. I tried rotating a few squares around and in a way I liked it better but in the end I just left the one to break things up a bit. This is what my plan looks like next to the result



I made a mistake colouring in in one strip, which still shows as faint pink. After awhile I began to wish that I'd done something like that instead of just using white, maybe having a very pale set of colours grading from one to another instead of the white. But I didn't have fabrics like that, and I wasn't actually going to do it all over again! Verdict: Ok, but I think I like things that are slightly less bitsy and repetitive. I do like solids though.

I had a few squares left over so I made a coaster.




That's right - I called it a coaster. Am I kicked out of crafty blogging now?