Paintbox Quilt

My son’s surgery went well, and we are home after a rough night in the hospital. He likes his new robot very much and is still thinking about what to name him. I’m too exhausted to do any sewing/crafting today, but have been meaning to post a picture of a work in progress, the Paintbox Quilt-a-long at Oh, Fransson! It started back in January, so I’m getting a late start and have done 26 of the 80 (!) blocks so far. I really don’t know why I am taking on this project because for the first time ever, I am starting a quilt without a recipient in mind. I want to keep it for myself, actually, but it really doesn’t go with the decor in any room of my house. I am doing the scrappy blocks, which will require 160 different prints plus 40 solids. (I’m pairing four prints with each solid. The directions call for 5 but there is no way I could find that many). I bought the Kona roll-up strips for the solids and am trying to see how many prints I can get out of my fabric stash. Luckily, there are a lot of blues in the solid strips and I have a lot of blue prints leftover from my son’s colorwheel quilt, but I already know I’ll have to buy some yellows and purples. But I think it will be pretty neat to see the finished quilt come together using so many different scraps from so many different projects.  Some of the scraps I’m using are close to 10 years old!

I had a definitely “duh!” moment in starting these blocks. This is the first quilt I’ve started since getting my new sewing machine last year and using the 1/4″ foot. My seams still were more than 1/4″ though, until I finally figured out I can move the needle position just a tiny bit to make the seams come out just right. I still have some blocks that are a bit wonky, but overall, I’m finding I’m not having to stretch or persuade the pieces to fit together like I have with past projects.