needles (the other kind)

The muddy nine

A batch of nine-patches, now, for the One-a-Day quiltalong, these in the color I like to call...mud.

It's a funny color. When I'm doing a spectrum quilt I always try to ease the transition between yellow and green — you can't just jump between those two colors because the yellow is, by default, a light value, and the green is usually at least a medium and often a dark. So I turn to mud to do the job.

It's not a pretty color, but I'm really fond of it — so much so, in fact, that I painted our guest room mud to go with the Kaffe Fassett print I showcased in the bed quilt. Dull and drab and exactly what I wanted for a room that's meant to feel restful, dark, and private.

A stitch in nine saves...um, well, never mind.

Because apparently I have too much time on my hands and not enough projects already in progress, I've joined the One-a-Day quiltalong at crazy mom quilts. The goal is just that: one 6" nine-patch block a day.

I think I'm up to 39 blocks.  They're so bright that every time I try to count I get a little vertiginous.

My own personal rule for this project is that each nine-patch has to have a significant portion made from scraps — either the five-piece patches or the four-piece ones, but preferably both.  This is in part an effort to make sense out of my scrap bag, a small portion of which is seen here in all its horrible horribleness:

 

...and also an exercise in using the tone-on-tone prints I now find excruciatingly boring, but which now comprise the majority of my stash.  Unless I figure out a way to be comfortable mixing them with the splashier prints I now favor, I'll have a lot of fabric that I simply don't use.  A lot.

Because I have a lot of scraps of the appropriate size from making this quilt and this one, I'm using them as inspiration.  Thanks to those leftover squares and strips, some blocks will be scrappier than others:

Each block should, at a distance, read as one color, mostly, although up close at one position in the block  — the four- or the five-piece portions — can be multicolored.  Then, if it doesn't end up looking too much like a circus clown ate a rainbow and vomited it into a woodchipper, I'll arrange the blocks in some sort of spectrum progression.

Or, anyway, that is the plan.