Revisiting Amsterdam

I made a LOT of progress this weekend on my Amsterdam-inspired quilt. I started back in October with picking a pattern and cutting into some of my orange fabrics for the hourglass blocks. It got put away in the flurry of the holidays, and I decided to take advantage of my three-day weekend to take it out and get back at it on Sunday. 

The first thing was to piece together all the little hourglasses I had already made into 9-patch blocks. Rather than mixing up the four orange fabrics together, I stuck with two fabrics for each block keeping one all-orange fabric and one fabric with some blue in it in each set. 

I especially love these bright bright orange prints together. The hourglasses blend together, and the patterns sparkle! What an amazing difference between these two blocks.

This is the true Amsterdam orange we saw everywhere on Queen's Day, bright bright bright. And those little blue x's are just perfect -- Amsterdam's city flag has 3 St. Andrew's crosses on it. Different colors of course, but I'm ok with projecting the city symbols up in the country's colors. 

For the next set of blocks I'm using a different pattern, one that requires 30 degree blades, reminiscent of windmills. I have really gotten quite attached to my marking pen... definitely one of my more useful pieces of paraphernalia. 

The wedges are swapped around and sewn together into big bursts of color. This block has little white kitties on it -- we (I) missed our cat while we were away! -- and the green color is meant to represent the bright green walls at AMOLF, our work place in Amsterdam. It even had a bright green couch!

And here are some bicycle wheels! Self-evident reason, really. The Kumari Garden print looks like splashing raindrops, so it's all tying together rather nicely. This might be my favorite block of the bunch.

In the book, it is recommended that the seams be pressed open, but I decided to try and see how pressing to one side would do. I find that it helps me match up points a lot easier. Of course, that last seam (horizontal in this picture) is one long one, but I found that pressing each side in the counter clockwise direction was ok as long as I let the center bunch "decide" which way it wanted to go before smooshing down with the iron.

And look at those near-perfect points! I may not end up using the yo-yos the pattern calls for on these blocks... all my points match up nice enough that they don't need to be covered up, and if I plan my quilting correctly I won't have to sew through the bulk.

Here are all the blocks finished up, I'd say that was a great day's worth of work! I'm going to set these aside for a bit while I consider my options of getting them together into one quilt top. It will involve natural linen sashing strips, but the details of color placement and whether or not to put something at the  sashing intersections remains to be seen. Maybe some yo-yos to make up for the ones I'm not using on the green blocks? Could be fun... it will be kicking around in my head for a bit. I certainly don't want to rush this one!

Linking up to Work In Progress Wednesday at Freshly Pieced, check out what everyone else is up to!