It was a long weekend of quilting. I finished up what I could do on the paper pieced poppy/poinsettia on Friday night. Also on Friday, I had stopped at the local quilt store (fortunately got out of work a little early) because they were closing at 6:00 and wouldn’t open again until the 3rd of January, and I knew I needed a few more fabrics to complete my range of colors.

This still needs something, I am going to take it to Color Theory class tomorrow night and see what my instructor and the other students suggest. I am thinking some fancy braided sections on the sides, in greens? It is supposed to be complementary colors, but right now it is just mostly red, and the greens are just a background. (This was supposed to be done for class in December, but I had to miss that class because of conflicts.) I like it, I think it is pretty cool, I hadn’t done anything with paper piecing that complicated, but I don’t know where to go next with it.

The OTHER quilt was to be a double complement – pick a color, use its complement, but you also use a color next to that color on the color wheel, and its complement. So I picked orange and blue and yellow-orange and blue-violet. I had seen a quilt made with big half square triangles (HSTs) on the internet, and I liked it. Since the Broncos lost on Sunday, maybe we will call it the Colorado Sunset, but what it really should be called is “Now I remember why I hate working with triangles.” Matching up points. Ugh.

Here are my fabrics. I decided two of them had too much blue-green in them and didn’t use them, otherwise I used all of them, plus three from my own collection.

Here are the first pieces on the wall (just the wall in my craft room covered with white flannel like a giant flannel graph board) (anyone else remember flannel graphs from Sunday School? We thought they were pretty cool. Can’t imagine what my Ipad packing nieces would think…)

(Another digression: when I said I was going to cover one wall in the craft room with flannel, Ken thought I meant something like red plaid flannel. He was relieved to discover I meant WHITE flannel.)

Anyway, I used a “quick” method to make 8 HSTs at once, so this was just the first ones, in only two colors.

It kept growing. I think I worked on it about 8 hours on Saturday.

Close to 9-10 hours on Sunday, I think.

And another 9 hours at least on Monday. So, I have determined that I cannot make a whole quilt in a 3-day weekend (at least not a very complicated one) and get it pieced as well as quilted. So I just have the top done for class.

And I have no desire to work that much on one project in one weekend. That is why I have so many projects, so I can alternate. But I wanted to make a bigger project this time, and I have been gone and/or busy with Christmas sewing, so as Ken said, “You bit off more than you could chew?”

I do like this quilt a lot, but now I think that I have the diamond, the focal point, too high and to the left, because I made my quilt bigger than the one I saw on the internet. So I might add some more blocks to the top and left side to make it bigger and put the focus more in the top third rather than right in the corner.

Our next project will be “split complement” and I am hoping to figure out what I am doing before class tomorrow night so I can get some fabric at the Golden Quilt Store where the class is held, if I need to.

We bought a new comforter last week. I know, I know, I am a quilter, I should make one, but the chances of that happening any time soon are slim. Now that we don’t have a cat that barfs all the time, I wanted something nice on the bed. Pho 78 is right next to Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and I had a coupon, and we had to go in there to replace the Brita pitcher I broke anyway.

(Part of it had melted SOMEHOW, I can’t imagine how that would happen in my kitchen, and when I tried to jam it back together, it apparently experienced structural overload.)

So we found a lovely comforter, mostly brown, but a reddish brown, with stripes, that goes OK with the poppy picture. Between it and the new flannel sheets, Ken claims he doesn’t need the electric mattress pad any more, I have been keeping my side turned down quite a bit.

Leo wants you to know he approves. And he wants you to rub his belly. This picture brought to you by Ken, who said “You don’t have enough cat pictures on your blog,”  – I bet that is the first time that sentence was ever uttered by a male in the history of the world.

Later this week, lots of food pictures and recipes, because when I wasn’t quilting, I was cooking so we would have plenty of leftovers for lunches this week.