Monsters, Potato Chips, and Rail Fence

 Welcome to Treadlestitches! 

Here's a happy silly little quilt made to be donated.  It's sewn from orphan blocks (the half square triangles and the two larger pieced blocks) and squares cut from a panel of encouraging monsters.

My wonderful quilt group had a challenge to use panels in a quilt.  (Thanks, Nancy Queen of Scraps!)  I found these guys in a box in the basement where they've languished for years, and put them to work.  This is my favorite one.  All kids should know they are loved.

It is definitely okay to be different!  Even if you have four arms and eyes on stalks!  These messages were meant for kids, but we grown ups need to know them too.  

I had a little trouble cutting these monsters out of their panel.  As usual, they were not printed perfectly straight (sigh).  To get the monster plus the saying I ended up with a sliver of color from the panel on a couple of these.  I'm trying not to worry about it.

Here's the back, a wild print I've used before, with a solid green binding.  The hsts are leftovers from a Rainbow Scrap Challenge project a couple of years ago.

Check out Eeyore in the border!  I added 2.5 in. (cut) scrappy squares for the outer border.  The batting is a frankenbatt from my 80/20 scraps.  I washed the quilt before donating, which is why it's kind of crinkly.

It's been fun working with yellow this month for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.  Are you participating? I always love seeing what other quilters are doing.  Here are this week's blocks.

My most "sensible" set of RSC blocks are these potato chips.  I only make 4 each month because I don't have very many pre-cut rectangles for each color, and each block takes 12 (plus 6 light ones).  I'm expecting to get two baby quilts from these at the end of the year.

This block has a monkey, a pink dog, honey bees, and a cat's face in the center.

I'm also making rail fence blocks.  I'm trying to shade them from light to dark.  Not always successfully, of course.  There aren't very many yellow scraps in my scrap baskets, so I'm repeating fabrics a lot, but it won't matter when the quilts are put together.

Speaking of rail fence, how about a new project?

I opened my new issue of American Patchwork & Quilting, and here it was!  It's called Rainbow Rails, and was designed by Laurie Matthews.  You can find it in issue #188, pages 33-39, on newsstands now through June 7.

This was exactly what I needed for my solid and light/low volume strips!  I practically ran upstairs to get started.

As usual, I modified the pattern to fit my strips.  Plus I cut rectangles rather than making strip sets, just because I'd rather work that way.  The pattern calls for 1.5 in. strips, which I changed to use my 2 in. strips to cut 2 in. x 5 in. rectangles.  My blocks will be 4.5 in. finished, and I'm making 90 of them.  In order to have a good variety of low volume pieces I limited each print to 10 rectangles or less.

Here's what I had left after cutting.  There is still a lot!  Maybe I need to make bigger quilts?

In other news, we're getting some good spring weather, and the tulips are blooming.

April showers are definitely a real thing here.  When we can't get outdoors we can color or draw.  Or quilt!

Have a wonderful week, whatever the weather brings.

Cheers for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at So Scrappy

Cynthia at Oh Scrap