A Pink Quilt

I am always fairly optimistic at the beginning of a new year, my head filled with what I believe I can/will achieve.  The feeling will last at least another week, until my summer leave is over!  But meantime I have been playing with old blocks and bits.

 

For many years I have carefully trimmed all of my crazy accumulated scraps in Bonnie Hunters Scrap User's System and filed them away in appropriately marked boxes.  Then for the past few years I have participated in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, with Angela's enouragement to us to use our fabrics with her declared monthly colour.  What we sew is our own choice, and so I had made a variety of different blocks, and these too got filed away!   Am linking up with her today,

 

I have now started to use some of these blocks, if only to make way for more. 

 

Postage stamp quilt number two.  Using the 8-inch blocks, this was one of the draft layouts back in early December.  When I was happy with the layout I stacked the columns ready to sew.

 

 

This was the start of assembling the columns on New Year's Day.

 

 And it became a finished top.  48-inch by 64-inch

 

We have been making a "row a month" blocks with my monthly quilt group.  These cute 6-inch sailboat blocks were for December's row.  

I find it very hard to resist Bonnie Hunter's year-end mystery, and these are the 60 sashing units for Grassy Creek.

 

 

I have two storage boxes with parts and sample blocks, and a couple of times in the past I have tried to organise these into usable groups.  I have made a couple of quilts in a mixed row style, but struggled to get some cohesion from the variety of blocks, sizes and colours.  After seeing what Cathy managed to do last year with her Creature quilts, the light bulb moment hit on Wednesday, and so sorted all of these units into separate colours.  Pink being January's colour, started by playing with a layout in anything with pink .

And, today, by adding in some longer strips, had this top complete!  51-inch by 71-inch.  The memories of some of those units stretch back to the 1980s, from left-over blocks won in local guild challenges (the others were made into a quilt for my late mother-in-law), to Block Lotto winnings, to extra blocks from quilts for two nieces, to fabric from skirts.  And there are still quite a few pink blocks left for next year!