Yesterday, we talked about quilting inspiration and two unfinished projects in my stash. Here’s the first one.

This book is Karen K. Stone Quilts and the quilt on the cover is called Cinco de Mayo. There are 36 quarter circle blocks, all with different paper piecing combinations.

Here is Karen’s website. It looks like she teaches workshops about making this quilt.

I couldn’t find a good picture of the complete quilt, so I took a picture of that page in my copy of the book.

Have a look.

One thing I like about the book is that she shows you each group of four blocks in detail, both with a picture of each and a line drawing of the component pieces. There are (of course) pattern templates included in the book, too.

And here are my blocks so far.

LOL. I remembered that I worked on it for AGES, but I only have four completed blocks!

After I took this picture, I realized I had sewn them together incorrectly. I picked them apart again. I didn’t start at the top left corner – these are blocks 3E, 3F, 4E and 4F. They should be rotated and positioned like this:

I did this mock-up digitally, which is why the carpet shows through in some places. A couple of these blocks can be swapped with others in the design, so I didn’t sew them together again yet. I see that I’ve used a turquoise print as the outside/background on all four of these blocks, so they shouldn’t be clustered together like this.

I will need to do is reassemble my stash for the project. One thing Karen teaches in her workshop is choosing a palette, then gathering fabrics that fit in each specific colourway – like that shade of turquoise, or the black with a floral print. They have to be pretty close in tone within the group, regardless of the pattern, to make the quilt cohere. (Although I will almost certainly stray too far, since chaos is how I roll.)

For this quilt design, she chose 11 colour groups. I’m using 8. I remember having trouble finding more of the particular bright yellow I used. Once your palette is gathered, you use at least one fabric from each chosen color in each block. I even kept track of what I used where in a chart – this was her suggestion to ensure that you use the colours throughout the blocks (instead of always using the turquoise for the background. I left the background off the chart, but that’s fixed now.)

You can see the palette pulling together a bit better in the quilt I made in her workshop because it used fewer colours and because you’re seeing 30 blocks together in this image. Each block has a bit of yellow and a bit of that red purple, a bit of indigo, etc. Even though the blocks are different, the whole comes together. I chose the gradient fabric for the inner border because it had both the yellow and the red-purple.

I need to get that one back on the quilting frame and finished up. I started the hand quilting and have done maybe 20% of it.

I still have the index card with swatches for the colours I chose for my Cinco de Mayo quilt. I’ll go through my stash and look for matches, maybe need to shop (for more yellow) then concentrate on finishing this quilt before dispersing the stash again.

In the meantime, I found another quilt top in the UFO stash that is much closer to completion. We’ll look at that one tomorrow.