Tuesday Tidings - The Planes Trains and Automobiles Blog Hop
Hi, and welcome to my stop on the #PTABlogHop today.
Along with Marlene Oddie of Kissed Quilts, I'm working with the Sweet Georgia Peach line of fabrics from the fall collection. which is now available in your local quilt shops. Each of the collections has a distinctive look to it, and to me, SGP has a little more muted look than some of the others collections.While the hop is now known as "Planes, Trains and Automobiles", when it was originally laid out to the Ambassadors, it used the general theme of transportation. There are a lot of modes of transportation to look at - planes, trains and automobiles (and we've seen some cute ones so far). However, I decided to go with a more 'romantic' method of transportation...as you shall see.
I looked at the fabrics in SGP as a great opportunity to look into a landscape type of quilt...but the question became how to incorporate a source of transportation into the piece. My inspiration came at Christmas, when my adult children got together to purchase me an electronic cutting machine - something which I had thought of, but never purchased for myself.
The cutter is known for being able to cut fabric, but in learning to work with it, I needed to start with a simple shape. I discovered a hot air balloon shape in the library, an d I was off and running.Knowing that you can vary not only the size but also the proportions of the 
shapes, it became easy for me to vary 3 individual balloon shapes, so that some appear to the eye to be closer to you (and brighter in color), while the others seem to fade away by using smaller shapes in conjunction with more muted combinations of the fabrics we were given. Each of the balloons is actually just two pieces fused together, then stitched to the background of the quilt.Working with the electronic cutter - especially when you are working on a deadline - is a little bit of trial and error; somewhere along the way, I didn't like the fact that it seemed a little off balance. The traditional blocks which you see on the left hand side are new to me blocks, called Birds in the Air. (If you're in a hot air balloon, you're going to be seeing birds, right?)There are a number of online tutorials that you can use for this block, the one I used was from Little Bunny Quilts. I really like the block, and will be using this construction method again.As part of this blog hop, I'm giving away a bundle of 5 Fat Quarters from the line (see below). In order to win the sample, please leave a comment - with a valid email address attached to it - that answers the following question. What is your favorite summertime recipe using peaches?
Winners will be drawn on Sunday, February 28th and announced in next week's Monday Musings blog.If you have been following the #PTAbloghop along, you know that Island Batik is also giving away a Fat Quarter Bundle of French Roasted .To enter that giveaway, you'll want to click on the Rafflecopter widget below. Good luck to you - and keep reading, we're not through our travels yet. a Rafflecopter giveaway