Weather and Quilting

We had the storms Saturday. Our power was off for several hours. Tornadoes touched down in Bartow county not too far from us. We were lucky, we just got rain and a little hail. I haven't heard if anyone was killed here or not, but a couple of people in Polk county were killed by the tornadoes. After the storm passed, we went to Lowes and bought seeds. We are planning to have a vegetable garden this year. We also stopped and got movies and food. When we got home, our power was back on.

After taking the class for using the strips we exchanged last year, I thought I'd come home and finish that top last week. Well, I sewed and sewed and sewed and finally got 40 blocks made. Unfortunately, the "Four Patch and Friends" quilt requires 80 blocks. So I started again pairing up strips, sewing them together and dissecting them and sewing them back together to make four patch blocks and sewing little squares on opposite corners of 4-1/2" squares to make the signature blocks. Maybe by the end of the day I will have 40 more blocks done. So much for thinking I could just zap this top together. All that chain piecing kind of slowed down progress on the little triangle blocks for the mystery. I'll make better progress once I start sewing the blocks into rows.

Why can't I resist a challenge?! Now I have two challenge quilts to make. AQG is doing a paint chip challenge. It sounded like fun and before I knew it, I was in Home Depot picking up paint samples.

Here is the one I picked.

Friday the Needle Turners Bee met and we went to Rome, GA to the Lavender Mountain Quilt Guild quilt show. It was at the Library. They had some nice quilts on display, not quite as many as last year. It is a small show, but they do it every year.

After viewing the quilts we headed to Hancock Fabrics. Before I could stop myself, I had whipped out my paint sample, it was still in my purse, and started matching fabrics. Here is what I came up with for the challenge.

Sandra and Bobby were helping me to pick the fabrics and they kept asking if I had a pattern picked out. I said no, I just planned to get a yard of each and that should be enough for a wall hanging. Then I spotted a book with a quilt on the cover that the block looked like a round saw blade. So I told the girls I was going to make four of those blocks and put sashing in between them for a wall hanging. The book is "Quilts inspired by Beautiful Blooms" by Pat Converse and the saw blades turned out to be poppies. The shade of pink in the sample says it is Pink Linen, but lit looks like a peachy pink to me and that is the color of the fabrics I picked that I thought matched the sample. I always think of poppies as being red, so I was worried about the peach colors I had. Low and behold, while at Lowes I found poppy seeds for Oriental Coral poppies that look the same color as my fabric. I bought the seeds.

The book has several nice quilts in it. Several are table runner/wall hanging size. Another one that I liked is a Morning Glory table runner. I have a couple of blues in my stash that, although they didn't qualify as a match for the blue in the paint sample, I do like them with the blue I picked as a match. So I'm thinking about making it also, as it only requires 1/4 or 3/8 yards of the fabrics, so that should leave me plenty of fabric left to make the four poppy blocks.