Sunday, June 26, 2016

Tombigbee River

I am slowly piecing another Project Linus quilt while my WIPs whimper quietly in the corner. It's just too darned hot to even think about cutting batting, basting and handling an entire quilt sandwich. I'll stick with small pieces of fabric for a while.

About six months ago, I bought a group of novelty fabric samples on eBay. The focal fabrics for Charming Cupcakes came from that batch, as did many of the fabrics in Scrappy Chili Peppers. There were also quite a number of racing themed fabrics, and that's what I'm using for this latest quilt, called Let's Go To The Races!


Some of the race cars are sort of cartoon-like, and others are fairly realistic. There are checkered flags, flames, and monster trucks. While I don't usually purchase anything with a black background for kids' quilts, the bright primary colors of the cars and trucks look great against the black.

The fabrics were part of a traveling quilt shop salesperson's samples, and so were cut 13" wide, with lengths varying from about 6" to about 20". They were stapled together so that the shortest pieces were on top and the longer ones peeked out below. I wanted to use as much of each fabric as possible and settled on cutting 5"x12" rectangles. Almost all the prints are directional, and this wide format block captures a sense of the cars moving sideways, I think.


The pattern is a version of Shadow Boxes, or Missouri Star's Illusions. Offset strips of gray make it look like the block is "floating" above the yellow background. Here I've laid out my first two test blocks to show how that will look. The illusion works best when there are more blocks. It will have 24 blocks, three across and eight down. That should make a nice size quilt for a young race fan.

This is a really simple pattern: nothing but long strips and straight sewing. All the sashing and shadows are the same, so there's nothing to keep track of. I can sew one piece or 20 without losing track of where I am. A good fit for highlighting the fun racing fabrics while keeping my time in the sewing room short and sweet.

1 comment:

  1. This is a really cute quilt. Some little one will love it. Sorry you all are experiencing such hot weather. Hopefully some cooler air will move in soon. We are in the North Georgia mountains. It's warm but really not too bad considering July is approaching. Have a safe journey.

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