Potpourri of Quiltiness

This week was a real potpourri for me of home decor, piecing, quilting, and blogging. This week is the final time Lee Heinrich of Freshly Pieced is hosting her Wednesday WIP link-up party so I did not want to miss inclusion in that, for Auld Lang Syne.

I made up a another color combination from my Sandy Klop Flying Circles pattern. I pieced only six triangles for this wall hanging this week and I accomplished that just today. Once again I chose a trio of fabrics with an intended orientation and then when I start flipping them around I become undecided. This combination of red on red dots, green on green swirl, and red/green stripe has the potential to look suspiciously Christmas-y. But then again so do the red chairs with apple green piping in my living room. The overarching question with this block for me is "Whirligig" or "Star". I originally intended the stripes in the interior to give a sense of whirling motion with the red on the outside. But the green swirl and the green stripe seemed to blend with each other too much so the inner section becomes a weak whirligig and an even flatter, non-3D star.

I tried moving the red in to be part of the star or whirligig. I like this better but it does give off a strong aroma of Christmas with those two basically solid fabrics strongly adjacent. The stripes give a sense of radiating rather that rotating.

On the third configuration, my only remaining option, I kept the stripe inside to give that rotating feel and used the red to contrast. The perimeter is a bit weak where the green swirl and green/red stripe are adjacent, but nevertheless, I think this arrangement is the front runner for me at the moment.

Actually I mis-spoke (mis-wrote?). I do have a fourth option. I could disperse these six triangles to be the spokes of a different interior hexagon like I did with a blue/green/red-white triangles in my Sandy Klop  class post of 1/23/16. The possibilities are endless. Well, to be precise, the number of possibilities is finite, but there are indeed a myriad to choose from.

On the home decor front, I was otherwise productive in that I finally did finish the barstool covers I'd been working on and mailed them off yesterday to my son and daughter-in-law. See my previous post.

This morning I attended a Handiquilter Sweet Sixteen Club at my semi-local quilt shop The Cotton Patch in Lafayette, CA. There, I practiced stitching two FMQ patterns from Lori Kennedy's blog. She has an entire collection of patterns and tutorials at theinboxjaunt.com/quilt/free-motion-quilting-tutorials/. Underneath each photo is the phrase I made up to chant to myself as I sew. The cute bows are much easier than they look. I chant, "sway down, sway up, sway down, figure 8 big, figure 8 little." "Practice make perfect," as the saying goes. I will settle for "Practice makes presentable."

That concludes my potpourri of quiltiness this week. Did I mention I also bought the yarn to knit my six-month-old grandson a baseball jacket style sweater? Aah, but that is the subject of another post. For now I am linking up to this week's WIP Wednesday.