Safe at Home One Done

Time to start sewing these blocks together. First the Flying Geese, twelve per block.

Almost together, hope it all fits.

First block all sewn together. I really like it! The varied greys really works the way I wanted it to. Now to assemble the last four and get onto working on row #2.

Safe at Home Choose Your Center Adventure

As I've been working on this first row of blocks for the Safe At Home quilt, my keeps getting stuck on that very very light grey center square. It was too much contrast and to my eye detracts from the overall form of the block.

Now that I'm closer to final assembly on these blocks, it was finally time 

"to make visual decisions visually"!

 This is almost right, but too much texture.

 As much as I love this fabric, it's all wrong for these centers, too strong of a pattern design, and the shade is much too dark.

 I almost went with this one, but decided the print was too much texture.

I wanted it to be this one because I love this print so much, but it was still too pale.

Yes! This almost-a-solid was the perfect combination of very slight texture and the right subtle shades of grey.

 Here's how it looks in all the blocks so far. On the right is a column of the grey squares I tried out in this exercise. Maybe I'll be able to use them in the rest of the rows of this quilt, who knows? I haven't looked at the rest of the rows yet!

Safe at Home A Bit of Progress

 A little more progress made on the Safe at Home row quilt. Still haven't decided on the center square color, I'm going to cut a grey print and try it out.

One question answered, yes I'm sewing the teeny tiny triangles together. These are left from trimming the Flying Geese. And look at that, my Add-a-Quarter ruler is standing up on its edge. I doubt I could do that on purpose if I wanted to.

Safe At Home Mini Steps

 A little at a time, I'm slowly stitching all the Flying Geese components to these blocks for the first row of the Safe At Home quilt. After drawing the diagonal stitching line, all matched up and ready to stitch the next round, this time it's purple/fuchsias plus orange/corals.Very vibrant and fun colors to work with.

 The tempting cutoff triangles-to stitch or not to stitch them together? They're in a little pile of their own until I decide.

Here's how the first round of flying geese, the background plus orange/corals. I am still deciding on the center square being that lighter grey. That part isn't assembled yet so I can still change my mind. There are five 12.5" blocks for this first row.

Safe at Home Into the Purple

 I finished the last of the cutting for the first row of the Safe At Home quilt, this time it was fuchsia and purples. Yum.

 That beautiful shiny new mat really shows off these colors.

 Sometimes the tangled scrap pile is even more beautiful to me.

Here's how the two of the shades of grey are looking on the design wall. Probably too much contrast, might have to rethink this part as I start sewing these blocks together.

Safe At Home First Cuts

 I started in on actually cutting my pieces for the first row of the Safe At Home quilt. Several shades of grey and golds are stacked up and waiting. I used the box from the Modern Quilter's Box since it was sitting out on my table and handy.

 A shadowy shot of the coral and orange strips ready for cutting down into smaller pieces.

The detritus left behind.

Safe At Home

 One of my local quilt shops (LQS) is Modern Handmade in Scotts Valley. Right after the Shelter In Place (SIP) was declared they started an 8 week row quilt pattern. The quilt is named Safe At Home and it is still available for download.

I loved the name of the quilt, the idea of a weekly row by row and the initial quilt block design and hot vibrant colors. And then I didn't start it and I didn't start it for various reasons.
But now I have actually gotten to a point where I can begin. Hooray!
So...here is my fabric pull and I'm off to start cutting. I may just stick with batiks, but I've pulled some prints too, we shall see.

Shopping Row by Row

 I now have obtained enough patterns from this year's Row by Row Experience to attempt to put together a quilt. These lovelies come from Golden State Quilting, a store in Campbell which is quite near to me, but I'd never been in there before. I've definitely bought Kaffe Fasset fabrics from them at PIQF though. They have an entire wall of his stuff, it's absolutely a traffic stopper when you enter the shop. It is a great store, wonderful staff, nicely laid out, perfect selection of fabrics that suits my tastes, I'll definitely be back. So, yes Row by Row Experience definitely brings fabric shops some new business.

These FQ's are from the Beverly's Fabrics in San Jose, which was enormous compare to the one I usually go to in Aptos. It looked like a Michael's craft store as you entered and was grocery store sized, but way in the back they had huge racks of fabric.

So, now that I have enough patterns, I'm going to begin trying to fit them together into one quilt top that doesn't look insane. There's a lot of common repeating imagery, so that'll help tie it together, and I'm going to try to use fabrics that I bought at each shop in that row and all the others too. Not really shooting to win the big prize of 30 FQ's at one of the shops if you're the first to turn in a completed quilt. But who knows, it might happen