Little whimsy

Isn't that just a cure for a cloudy day? If these colors don't brighten up a room, I'm not sure what will. I've known for a while now that my partner in crime in lab, Kelly the postdoc, is expecting her first child. I've been wanting to make a quilt using Kona pomegranate as the background ever since I bought that bunny print in Portland, and aren't I just so lucky that the baby is a girl! Sometimes I like colors because of the name. Pomegranate qualifies as one of these. Somehow if it was named something like 'bright pink' I'd be less inclined. Kona's got me figured. Kelly hails from Trinidad, so I think these bright tropical colors will make her and her little one pretty happy, too.

Back in February I made a block for the do.Good stitches bee that I dubbed Dutch Geese. When I finished it, I thought how great it would be on a baby quilt and decided then I was going to use that block on Kelly's quilt though I had no other thoughts concerning fabric or colors yet. Fast forward a couple months, a few finished projects later, and I gave myself permission to start something new. This quilt is a good one to work on while I have a couple others being quilted because it is pretty simple and I'll be done with the piecing and have the card table cleaned off for quilting before I know it. 

The design I have in mind is a single Dutch Geese block with couple rounds of solid around it set somewhere off center in a sea of Kona pomegranate. The binding will be one of these fun bright green prints, the back is going to be pieced using these fabrics minus the bunnies, which I have plans for in another project. I am going to take this opportunity of a quilt with a huge amount of negative space to try out an orange peel quilting pattern similar to this tutorial from Oh, Fransson!, but I have a thought about how to do it with half circles instead of quarter circles. We'll see!

But I get ahead of myself. Already thinking about quilting. First things first, the block. Again I made a set of flying geese blocks and pieced them together in columns, two of each print. I'm enjoying how the bunny in that blue print looks like he wants to sit on the chair below him. 

Then, my favorite part... using the trimmings from the geese to make pinwheels. Waste not want not. The seams are pressed to one side in the HSTs to make lining up the center points easy. This strip of pinwheels dictates the width of my block.

I added in flying geese units of one more print I pulled from my scrap jar of blues and a rectangle of the white-on-white background print to the columns of geese before assembling the block. As it turns out, the rectangle was the same size as my geese units, so one could also just add one more unit instead. I like the empty space. A quick cut of strips of sashing to go between the blocks and voila! I made the sashing strips a little wider in this iteration to make this block finish at 14.5" wide by 16" long.

I was wondering if it was the colors that made me like the last block so much, but making this a second time was still fun and I love how it turned out again. Third time's a charm? I might just use this as the design for my month of the Bee Sew Modern bee, if I don't think up something else by September...