Mom decided that she wanted a very structured pattern for her braids so she is going to start her braids with the same color each time. I have decided to follow the book and have a more undulating pattern, but I did have to tweak what colors each of my braids were going to start with.

We spent the week sewing together our large braids. Since my colors were so close together I had to keep my fabrics labeled at all times. One of our classmates gave the suggestion to number some flower head pins and use those for labels. That was brilliant. It worked so well. I used one pin to mark each stack of fabric and a second pin in the braid I was sewing to tell me what the last color I used on a particular braid was. That allowed me to do a little bit of chain piecing. I still only worked on two braids at a time, but I think it was faster than not chain piecing.

Once I got a couple of my braids completed I decided that my small inner borders would be a very pale yellow. So, I also spent this week trying to achieve that yellow. It took me 3 tries, but I finally got the yellow I was looking for. Sorry, I didn’t take any pictures of the yellow, so you will have to wait to see it in the finished quilt top.

I forgot to mention in my dyeing posts that my yellow accent fabric and my green outer border fabric is a white-on-white dot pattern. I like to overdye white-on-white fabrics because you get interesting results. The front is usually very high contrast and the back is very subtle.

Here is a sample of the green fabric on the front and back.

Once I decided on which greens I wanted to use I layed out the yellow accent fabric and the green border fabric. Once with the bold side up and once with the subtle side up. I decided that since my gradations were so subtle, my accents should be more subtle also. What would you have picked?

Here is today’s fabric out on the line.

The quilt calls for half yards each of 12 colors in gradation. I decided since it was such a large quilt already, I would expand it a little and make it a queen size quilt for my guest bedroom. That room is currently being decorated in bright yellow and green, so I decided to go with a 12 step green gradation with accents of yellow.

For Day one of dyeing I dyed 12 shades of green, a gray to use as a narrow border and the yellow for the accent square.

Here is all of the fabric hanging on the line to dry.

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I had some small pieces of left over flannel from the quilts I made for the fire victims a while back. I ironed all the pieces flat and packed them up for our sewing evening. With the help of several other sewers we were able to sew together enough scraps in one evening to make 4 quilts for the hospital.

Overall the group produced over 20 quilts that evening and by our monthly meeting, we had about 50 quilts to deliver to the hospital.

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