The Color Quilt Almost Done and the Challenge Quilt is Done!!

The blocks are finally all done and the triangle inserts are all cut and all totally bias because of the odd shape of the rhombus.  This was not easy.  I finally picked a mellower yellow than I had before and luckily had just enough yardage to make the setting triangles.  

Here I have sewn about half the quilt together.  Matching the points was easier than I thought it would be and this step has gone relatively quickly!

It's finally all together!!  I really think it needs borders to kind of hold it together.  If I had used a dark triangle for the setting triangles, this probably wouldn't be necessary but I couldn't bring myself to do my usual dark outside!  

My first was a thin orange strip and then a dark green about the size of the strips on the rhombuses.  

I have finally decided to go with a narrow red strip and then a fairly wide navy blue.  This will make the quilt 72 x 96 which is a little bigger than the lap robe I had envisioned!!

This is the background for the challenge quilt for the Quilters by the Sea. The theme was "circle of friends" and had to be circular.  I remembered a Facebook post where I mentioned that I was glad to be back and seeing my birds again down here was like meeting up with old friends so that became my inspiration.  This is obviously a beach-y looking background.

 I printed a bunch of my pictures on fusible fabric and then carefully cut out the birds from the picture and fused them down onto the background.  This is by no means all the birds I see (in fact there are two more on the back but still not complete) but there was only so much room on the piece.  I used a thin Sharpie to put their names underneath.  It was kind of fun!  I may actually hang this somewhere.  I used a piece of painted fabric on the back and of course all the fabrics on the front are scraps of my hand dyes.  The background is pieced.  I machine quilted the background and then used the pillowcase method to put on the back (so no quilting shows on the back).  I put the birds on after it was all quilted.  This blog won't appear until after quilt club tonight as it is supposed to be secret!