Pond Life – Colour & Inspiration Tuesday and Link Party

Grumpy Frog colour scheme at Clever Chameleon

Waaay more excited about my Pond Life baby quilt than this frog is!

Today I have been working on the Pond Life quilt that I introduced last Tuesday. Want to see how it’s going? And find out who is featured from last week’s link party? Well, read on, Macduff!

accuquilt challenge logo with Island Batik

What and Why is the Pond Life Quilt?

For April, the Island Batik Ambassadors have been set the challenge of using the Accuquilt Ready. Set. GO! system we received in January to make a baby quilt.

Ready Set GO cutter from accuquilt

The GO! Cutter is not a new-to-me toy. I bought one several years ago, and since then have been impressed by its solid well-builtness and ease of use. However, the GO! QUBE part of the Ready. Set. GO! collection is a new-to-me toy and it has opened up a whole new world of piecing.

The QUBE is a set of eight dies that fit together in a large number of permutations and combinations to allow easy construction of a big variety of quilt blocks. Including a number of blocks I had never bothered attempting to sew before. Such as squares on point (too much maths to be bothered with), and parallelogram patches (too time consuming to cut accurately). So I decided to give my new 8″ QUBE a thorough workout and design a sampler quilt using all the dies and lots of different quilt blocks.

The beginnings of that process can be found in last week’s post here.

At the end of last Tuesday I had this set of pretties:

Pond Life Progress

Pond Life has now progressed from that amoeba of an idea to at least pond scum status….. a long way before becoming something useful, but definitely higher up the food chain. 😀 We are of course, aiming for a beautiful baby quilt filled with water lilies and frogs – at the moment we have about half the blocks we need. But no frogs yet.

After today’s sewing I have these extra blocks:

As you can see, I’ve made several more water-only blocks and several water lily/flower blocks.

I also decided along the way that my Pond Life quilt should have some hard-to-see fishes in it.

Fish in pond
Photo by Sora Sagano on Unsplash

So, here is my first “subtle fish” block. I currently have two more blocks similar to this planned for the Pond Life quilt.

Pond Life fishes block

When all the blocks are done and sewn together, I still intend to add those frogs!

Frog on pond
Photo by Andrea Junqueira on Unsplash

Afterall, I bought this die to play with!

Frog appliqué cutting die

While I do that, you should do this…..

Check out last week’s Colour & Inspiration link party features!

fish looking surprised
Photo by yu tang on Unsplash

This was me when I saw the following two beautiful blue and white quilts this week. Of course the Chameleon pretty much looks like this all the time anyway, but usually I try to keep my mouth closed. I’m not so fond of flies……

There was something about these two quilts that really appealed to me this week…. possibly their calm and clean look in amongst all the complicated and frantic colour combos of my own current quilting projects.

Clever Chameleon logo

Denise of For the Love of Geese and a fellow Island Batik Ambassador has taken to her new Accuquilt GO! like a ship to water!

She re-set a ship quilt block from the Accuquilt Ready. Set. GO! pattern book into this stunning arrangement called Sail Away. The simplicity of this design coupled with the high contrast in Denise’s fabrics make this a real stunner, don’t you think?

Denise's ship quilt

If you agree, you can grab this pattern as a free download from Denise’s post. Hey! Hey, where are you going?!! We’re not done here yet, Denise’s pattern will still be there in a moment…..! Ok, go grab it, but come back here, mind! Because, for our second feature…..

Clever Chameleon logo

Nancy of Grace and Peace Quilting showed the faux shibori quilt that she has just finished quilting for her friend Missy. Missy’s beautiful quilt is made from Moda “Shibori” printed fabrics.

When I say “showed”, I really mean “displayed to perfection”! To do this quilt justice, Nancy took the trouble to photograph it in a Japanese garden. Head on over to Nancy’s post for all the Japanese flavoured eye-candy goodness she served up for you.

Missy's shibori quilt quilted by Nancy

But before you go (again), tell us, what’s the latest excitement in your own sewing room?

Clever Chameleon logo

Tell us – what are you working on, or have recently finished in your sewing room? We want to know so we can visit and be inspired. Link up a blog post, an IG post or simply a photo from your computer.  See if you can get the Chameleon to turn quilted with happiness. We’d love to see your quilting colours!

  • Link up your latest or recent quilt/sewing excitement. All quilt construction stages welcome – finished quilts, quilt blocks – even fabric pulls! Or inspiration sources!
  • You have 50 characters in the link description…. tell us who you are and what your fantastic project is.
  • URL links are not necessary to link up…. non-bloggers 100% welcome! If you don’t have a URL, you can link up with just a photo.
  • Take a moment to visit some friends who came to the party – leave a little love and make their day. And a link back to Clever Chameleon is always appreciated.
  • Do it now……. before you forget!

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

The Chameleon turns rainbow with pleasure when he hears from you. I am more reserved, so I will respond in gratitude by email instead. Now that it’s your turn…. Scroll right to the end, leave me a comment and tell me, what do you think? Thanks for connecting!

Would you like to keep in touch with Clever Chameleon and the fun quilty ideas I design as well as find all over the internet? You can follow directly for email updates, or through Bloglovin’, Pinterest, IG or FB. All your follow options can be found here. Don’t forget to link up all your current quilting projects on Tuesdays at our Colour & Inspiration Linky parties!

11 Replies to “Pond Life – Colour & Inspiration Tuesday and Link Party”

  1. Ohhh, Pond Life is coming together nicely. I love our subtle fish. Thanks for showing us updates and inspiring us. I make greeting cards and about 10 years ago my husband got ma a Cuttle bug, which is an embossing hand crank machine. It still works like the day I got it. I love it.

  2. The chameleon looks so happy today in all his blueness. Thank you for sharing my quilt and pattern. Once complete, Pond Life will blow my boat outta the water. It is coming along beautifully.

  3. Hi Dione! I’m looking forward to seeing this baby quilt complete, especially with the addition of the frogs. I sure am enjoying the different collection of the blocks you’ve made so far, and the fabrics you chose from IB are perfect for this theme. ~smile~ Roseanne

  4. I think I need to get my hands on a Qube… then again, I should probably use the many dies I already have first 🙂 But it still looks cool! May I suggest we meet for a Go! weekend sometime?! xx

  5. I love the variety in your blocks and the colors in this quilt! The frog will be terrific, but I think I love those subtle fish. I look forward to seeing it all done…

  6. Dione, I forbid you to call your quilt POND SCUM!!! Goodness! It’s coming along beautifully! And I’m so intrigued to read about your experiences with the GO! cutter, and especially with the Qube dies. I bought the GO! Baby cutter 2 years ago and an assortment of dies, primarily curved one patches (clam shell and apple core) that I wouldn’t want to cut by hand. But now that I’m focusing on improving my longarm quilting skills, anything that speeds up my cutting and piecing process to create more tops for quilting is sounding like a better and better investment. The only downsides to the Accuquilt die cutters as I see it are: 1. the high cost of the dies and 2. the more heavily you invest in the dies, the more you feel like you must USE them, which could limit what I design to what works with available dies. But now I’m going to go look at that Qube set again. One thing that I have not tried yet is cutting strips with the Accuquilt cutter. I understand how it’s a time saver for HSTs and parallelograms, but isn’t it faster, easier and more accurate to cut strips with a rotary cutter and ruler?

  7. Hi Dione, that is going to be a fabulous quilt. The colours, blocks, themes and FROGS are going to make it awesome! (I love frogs 🙂 ) Really looking forward to seeing those frogs on there.

Comments are closed.