YTRR, continued - Advice needed

Earlier this week the rules for the fourth round of the YTRR in the Carol Doak yahoogroup were revealed. I spent two days printing, cutting, pasting, coloring, photographing and doing it all over again and again. I came up with two versions, but still can't decide. 

Below you will find Version 1 and Version 2. I am leaning towards Version 2. Version 1 might be a drop too busy for this round. This round should be a little quieter than the previous ones. Also, I don't know if you can notice, but I tried to design round four with a way to make it easy to work into round five. Hopefully, it will fit with the rules for round five. If not, I will make my own rules!


Please let me know, in the comments section, what you think about version 1 and version 2, and why. I will not have time to do any cutting or sewing until Sunday, anyway.

Version 1

Version 2 

Two of my favorite bloggers are giving away great stuff. 


First there's Karen of Sew Many Ways who's giving away a bunch of her Tool Time Tuesday supplies to celebrate one year of TTT. You have until March 21 to enter. You really should go through her blog to read some of her ideas. She's also added two beautiful Moda Fat Quarters and a couple of patterns.


Then there's one of my favorite podcasters, Jackie of Jackie's Quilting Chronicles and Canton Village Quiltworks who recently interviewed Karen Griska of The Selvage Blog, another one of my favorite bloggers from a while back. Jackie is helping Karen to give away TWO autographed copies of her wonderful book, Quilts from the Selvage Edge. You have until March 22 to enter.


I'm slowly working on a selvage quilt, but am really low on selvages. (Hint, hint!)

Enjoy your weekend,

Debbie

Yours Truly Round Robin

What is a Yours Truly Round Robin (YTRR)? A round robin is usually a project where one makes a quilt block or other piece of needlework or craft and then sends it to the next person in a group of like minded participants. Each participant adds on one round and sends it on to the next one. The number of rounds usually corresponds with the number of people in the group. When the last round is done, the piece is returned to the original owner. The individual rounds follow a set of rules decided by either the members of the group or the organizer of the whole project.

A YTRR is a round robin where you do all the rounds yourself, thus no need to mail it around. Carol Doak came up with her first YTRR challenge (this is the second) after some members of her Yahoogroup got burned while participating in a 'real' round robin. Carol provides the rules for each round every 3-4 weeks and everyone shares photos of their progress in individual albums dedicated to each round. You do need to be a member of the Carol Doak Quilting Group at yahoogroups in order to participate.

All rounds must include a Carol Doak block design. This includes the free patterns on her website, the MANY free patterns designed especially for the members of the yahoogroup, and the MANY books that Carol has published. Here are the rules for the individual rounds, so far.

Round 1, center block: "Make a center using any number of paper-pieced blocks (my designs) in any size in any number of colors." 

For my center block I used the New Year's 2010 block, designed by Carol just for the members of the yahoogroup.

Round 2, border 1: "Should contain only two colors and must include at least one Carol Doak design. You can use different fabrics containing different shades of the two colors, but only two colors should be used in this round. One color fabrics can be solids or tone-on-tones. Or you can use a print fabric that contains only your two colors or shades of your two colors."

For this border, I used the South Carolina block from the 50 Fabulous Paper Pieced Stars book, in regular and mirror image.When I turned the center block on point, I decided that the next round should result in a finish of six inches, otherwise I knew I would get into trouble in subsequent rounds! This resulted in printing out the S.C. block unit foundations in a weird measurement, in order to get it to fit.

Round 3, border 2: "should contain one or more paper-pieced rectangular blocks. Now this round can contain other paper-pieced blocks, however at least one rectangular block should be included. You can put two square blocks together to create a rectangular unit."

For this border I used Unit 19 from the Simply Sensational Nine Patch book, also in regular and mirror image. It is one inch wide. So, the little triangles are approximately 1/4".

In future updates on this project, I will not be posting the rules to the subsequent rounds. You will need to join the Carol Doak Quilting Group to get them!

Here's the piece, so far. Don't forget to enlarge for the detail. It now measures 8" (eight inches) square.

Here's my worksheet. I do not use a quilting program to design my quilts. I printed out the foundations on regular paper, cut out the units, then pasted them to a larger paper. For larger quilts I used graph paper to design a scaled down version, but for minis I design it in the actual size. I color in with markers or pencils, the old fashioned way. You can see that I changed my mind about the colors in round three.

Terri of Sew Fantastic is giving away a Giant pack of beautiful Kona Fat Quarters in the 25 most popular colors. Such a treasure of solid colored fabrics! You have until March 14 to enter.

Enjoy!

Debbie

Purim Journal Quilt

  
Today is the holiday of Purim in Jerusalem. For everywhere else in the world, including most of the rest of Israel, Purim was yesterday. This Wikipedia article gives a pretty good explanation of Purim and its associated customs. 

For one of my journal quilts a few years ago, I collected some of the paraphernalia that came with the gift baskets we received that year for Purim and secured it down into a collage with a piece of tulle. (Don't forget to click on the photo to enlarge.)

Happy Purim!

Debbie