Quilting through Rose-colored Trifocals!: All Caught Up!!

Now there's an exaggeration if I've ever written one!?!

All Caught Up??

I don't think I'll every really enter that state but I am caught up with the second quilt along I'm currently enjoying -- the #smorgasblocks project led by the creative Anneliese at Eye Candy Quilts.

(Click above to read all the posts and find the links to the patterns featured here today.)

I was delighted to have a reason to piece Barn Bats as shared by Elizabeth Hartman on her blog.

I had bookmarked that tutorial quite some time ago, but of course never actually indulged in the process of making it. It felt like it took longer to organize the fabric than it did to piece the block.

Every bat is a different fabric and my goal was to spread the blacks and yellows evenly around the block since they seem to stand out most -- interesting that they ended up paired together -- I didn't notice that until just now looking at the photo.

I'll be doing this again for sure! Two notations I made on my instructions -- first, don't put my favorite prints on the top or bottom of each row since those will be trimmed when squaring up the block (which I have not done yet). Second, the order of the colors is reversed from top to bottom from the layout I planned. It's not a problem for me visually, but it confused me for a few minutes when I was piecing since I knew where I had placed certain prints.

The second block in my catch-up binge is Whiskers, a larger than life cat's face. I have to confess I was disappointed to encounter yet another paper piecing block and didn't love the scale of the block.

In the end, the paper piecing wasn't such a chore after all.

Here are all the units as finished and ready for the next step.

One of the aspects of this pattern from Anna of Six White Horses that I appreciated is that she shaded the seam allowances of her pattern units and it was easier for me to remember not to cut the seams off during the trimming step!! Thank you, Anna!

Since I wasn't thrilled with the scale of the block, I choose to break it up a bit with two fabrics for the face. And the choice of plaid with a print background kept the overall image softer and more in keeping with the feel of the other blocks.

I'm listening to A Man Named Ove on Hoopla right now and the weather has cooled enough to turn off the air conditioning in the studio and open the windows, so it all made for a pleasant evening of piecing and trimming and watching Whiskers evolve on the floor next to my machine.

In the end, I'm happy with the block and it blends into the mix perfectly.

The third block in the backlog is Garden Fence from Hyacinth Quilt Designs -- so easy -- yea!!

And the next day, I saw a quilt on Instagram made with this block that inspired me to save this design for a future charity quilt -- it even uses 2 1/2" strips which fill my go-to sourdough scrap box!

I hope the block isn't as crooked as it looks in this picture! I hope I had the camera cocked at a funny angle. If not, I might have to revisit the outer sashing.

So that's eight blocks assembled so far -- two or three more? I need to use more white background in the remaining blocks to balance things out a bit but I'm happy with the results and beginning to think about a simple quilting strategy for this.