Rivers and stuff

Finished up the river postcards (below) and did this week's journal quilt as well - using a river like the ones on the postcards, and a sun like the ones in the sun postcards - only with this one, I used my little soldering iron to trim the sheer around the sun. And a wee bird charm just for fun.



Also spent some time playing with two other things - the first is the set of pineapple blocks I received from various quilty friends as a comfort gift when my dad died in the autumn. The wonderful Sophie organised these pineapples, and I have been trying to find an arrangement for them. There are actually 37 blocks, so I played with arrangements of 35 (5x7) and 36 (6x6) and decided in the end on the arrangement below. The main challenge with arranging these blocks is that some of them have black corners and some have brown. The black ones work much better on the diagonal, so I have decided to keep them clustered together. This arrangement leaves out two blocks - one of which has some black corners and some brown, so it was very hard to use, and the other of which had brown corners, but I chose to leave it out because the fabrics were less tone-on-tone than some of the others and therefore stood out more. The two extra blocks I will either make into cushion covers or use on the back, or find another use for. Now it only remains to sew them together. And decide if it wants a border. And quilt it. And...probably I shouldn't have used the word "only"! Looking at it again, I can see some of the black blocks are very light in the brown logs, so I might move them around a bit. but the basic idea stands.



The second thing I am working on is the background for a challenge quilt with my small virtual group - the challenge is to do something with the theme "Forest" - I used lots of fabrics with trees on them - I've been hoarding them for a while now. Once they are together, I will do lots and lots of quilting (trees, of course) on it, adding various other things, like fibres and who knows what all else. I imagine it will take a while, but luckily, it's not due until September.