Design Wall / BOM's Away

After a week off with our temporary transition to California, I was able to get back to work on a few things, including more winery themed placemats. I had gotten the quilting done on 4 sets before leaving home, and so now have one set bound to take home and deliver to the recipient. The other three sets, may or may not get done before I head home on Thursday morning. We'll see how the project on my design wall progresses...it needs to go home ready to quilt.

Design Wall

On my design wall (a spare bed in the house we are using for 6 weeks while in California) are 9" cut squares from a man's shirt collection. His widow sent them to me to make a king size quilt. I hope I do it justice. After working on that small wall hanging a few weeks ago with similar types of shirts, I wanted to keep this as simple as possible. The values of the shirts fortunately fit into three groupings, dark (blues), medium (tans) and light (white). Nice! At least some contrast.  On the right is my EQ7 design layout. On the left is the upper left section. I think it is only going to look scrappy, but hopefully with some intention of a design so it has good balance.

Have you ever noticed that there is an easy fat quarter out of the back of shirts? I used this rule of thumb when developing the design. You can also easily get a 9" square out of each front side (below the pocket) too. That makes 6 squares from each shirt. I was sent 23. That makes 138 blocks easily. I discovered that extra large shirts can yield 3 blocks across the back shirtbottom, although I only found one of those, but sometimes you can get a block out of the sleeve if it is sufficient in size. Not all would work, but I found enough for the few extras so I could make an 11 x 13 grid which needs 143 blocks.

BOM's Away
I also took a break from working on the above project and did another Alaska 2007 Shop Hop block. This is block #5 this year so I'm a little ahead, but needed something quick and easy to check off the list. Although the instructions called for light green, it was HOT pink....so here it is (unpressed).

More Design Walls at Judy's and BOM's Away at Lyn's.