My goal for the month is to use up lots of orange scraps, making blocks for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. I decided to start by making wonky borders for my New Orleans-inspired Happy, Scrappy House blocks. That's when I got distracted.
After making orange wonky borders, there were only a few borderless blocks left. I picked out border fabrics for those blocks and have completed most of those, as well.
After pinning the blocks to the design wall (not all of them are visible in the picture), I counted up and decided I liked the idea of a 7 x 7 arrangement. I'll need to make a few more houses to get to the magic number of 49. I also need to trim all of these blocks to get them to a uniform size. I was hoping the wonky borders would allow me to cut the blocks to 10.5 inches, but no luck. The trimmed size wound up being 10 inches, so they'll finish at 9.5 inches. I'm trying to decide if I want to add sashing and cornerstones, but that much orderliness is out of character for New Orleans.
I thought it might be fun to incorporate some sunflowers into this quilt. After the flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina, volunteer sunflowers popped up all over the city and became kind of an unofficial harbinger of the city's rebirth. I found a picture of this block on Pinterest, and last night I tried my hand at re-creating it. This block won't go in the quilt, but I think I will make some more - maybe putting a block in each corner.
Speaking of hurricanes, I hope all my Florida quilting friends have finished their evacuations or preparations and are ready for Hurricane Irma. My family and my husband's family all live in Florida, so we've been watching and worrying along with everyone else. Here's hoping (and praying and maybe even using a little gris-gris) that Irma fizzles before inflicting too much damage on the Sunshine State and all her inhabitants!
