Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Pineapple Quilt

 Have you ever fallen so much in love with making a pattern that you just couldn't stop? Earlier this year I took a class on making pineapple blocks using a wonderful new ruler that makes them easy peasy. In fact, they are so easy and fun to make that I actually ended up making 80 blocks. Yep, 80! Without borders, my quilt measured 80 x 100. I don't even own a king sized bed!
 
Of course, the quilt needed borders desperately. I had pulled all of the colors from a wonderfully colorful border print that I already had, but I had lots of choices on an inside border. Here are a few that I check out.
 



Each color completely changed the look of the entire quilt. So I called in a couple of consultants, Sinbad and Spook. They were charged with selecting the perfect color to complement both the blocks and the border.

 So they looked at it from one perspective...


and another...

 
and finally chose the green. The quilt is at Mom's right now waiting to be quilted. I'll take some pictures when I get it back.
 
In the meantime, I have a very ugly quilt to play with over the summer. I have LOTS of African fabric scraps (I LOVE African fabrics!), so I decided to throw them all into a pineapple quilt of their own. I have two different background fabrics - the sandy looking fabric in the blocks in the top left and bottom right and the blue/purple/black fabric top right and bottom left. I'm going to alternate them. Isn't it wonderfully hideous? I'm loving it already! African fabrics come in such a wide variety of colors and color combinations that it was impossible to find a workable background. I wanted black, but too many of the fabrics themselves had black backgrounds. The same for white. So I'm going with clashy-clashy. We'll see how it turns out.
 



We'll just leave Spook contemplating his next fabric choices. He hates it when the floor is bare of quilts, so I had to give him a lone block to sit on. Silly cat.
See you later,
Debbi