Colorful Slices

Some colorful slices showed up on my design wall this last week. Over the past few months, I’ve been working through the Block Study Collective with Tara Faughnan. You can see some of my earlier block studies in this post. February was the month for working with big slices. Tara walked us through several variations, one of which was improv slices, and of course I had to give that a try. Tara also gives us a suggested fabric pull for each month, but I opted to use my solid scrap stash for these.

Before long, I had 12 slices up on my wall, arranged in circles. There are four slices in each circle; I forgot to take a photo of a single slice. I made four additional slices to create one more circle, then chose background fabrics for each circle. Each slice was sewn using a paper foundation. I tried not to think too much about what color should go where, or how wide or narrow the strip should be. Cutting the arc of the slices freehand on the background fabric was easier than I thought it would be.

I chose background fabrics by pulling fabrics from my stash and just going with colors that made the circles pop. The navy block is Grunge, the orange is a Kona solid, the pink and green are prints from my stash. Stitching them together, the slices didn’t match up due to the freehand cutting, so each circle has its own wonkiness.

I had some fun with straight line quilting, using three 50 wt neon-colored threads from Aurifil – neon orange (#7000), neon yellow (#7001) and neon yellow (#7002). The quilting is spaced roughly one-half inch apart.

The backing is a bold print from Frond Fabrics. It is a very dominant fabric and difficult to use, so it’s perfect for the back of this bold quilt. I used Hobbs 80/20 for the batting.

And last of all, the binding. I considered a multi-colored stripe, but it was too distracting. So I decided to match the binding to the squares. It was pretty easy to do with some careful measuring and pinning.

The colorful slices were fun to make, decreased the solid scrap stash just a tiny bit, and satisfied my itch for some improv play. I have no plans for this quilt. It finishes at 28 x 28.5 inches, and I still need to give it a name – I’m waiting for one to come to me, so for now it’s just Colorful Slices.

A finished quilt is a great way to start the week!

Wendy