Monthly Color Challenge - May
I'm pleased to be joining the Monthly Color Challenge this month; it's been a fun and refreshing way to look at basics of color, and it's a challenge hosted all year by Patterns by Jen. All of the pattern dimensions for each month's blocks are available on her site, and this is a great way to take a pause to revisit some of the most common quilt blocks in your library.
This month's color pull is this really light lemony green color way, and believe it or not, it's one that I've been able to use quite a bit over the years. It does pair will with Turquoise, but that's last year's blog post. You can actually read more about that one here.
These two fabrics will work well with each other for this. The variation of the half square triangle block that I'm going to use to illustrate this is acutally a variation of the Broken Dishes setting, and these made into a very nice block.
To make this block, you start with two same size squares (one of each fabric), and place one on top of the other, right sides together. The next step is to draw a diagonal line with a pencil and a ruler from the top right to bottom left - that will become the reference line (and eventually the cutting line) used in this block, and you refer to it when sewing the seams, one on each side of the line.
At this point, I square up each half square triangle to make sure that each of the building blocks of this piece are exactly what they are supposed to be. I take a square ruler (slightly larger than the block I want to make) and put it on the block, making sure the diagonal line in the ruler is lined up with the diagonal in the block. Trim any excess and repeat for the other blocks.
This block was very quick and straight forward to make, and the block is completed and squared up as it should be. In fact, I enjoyed making it so much that I used it (with admittedly slightly altered dimensions) on another project that I've got up on the design wall...if you change the fabrics to be all low volume, you can get quite a nice pieced background. This is a very special quilt in process, and you'll hear more about that later on this spring.
