Colour & Inspiration Tuesday: Stops and Starts

Today’s Inspiration: Rare New Fabrics

In what was an unusual experience for me, I bought new fabric last week. For myself. With my own money. Yup.

Not needing to buy much fabric is both the upside and downside of being a fabric brand ambassador/inefficient sewer combo. Because it means I also don’t get to choose much fabric. So, I felt seriously out of practice walking into my local fabric warehouse with no idea what I really wanted and no third-party constraints on my decisions (except quantity, ha!). What is this odd feeling, called “too many choices”?

In the end I bought the fabrics you see in the Stops and Starts colour board above. I love these colours. Read on, and I’ll show you my new Love with a Twist background made up in these fabrics. I also have a small correction to give you for the Love with a Twist Throw construction instructions. And, of course, we have our weekly reader link up and fun featured projects.

Another Turn at Love with a Twist

I’ve been a bit tired the last couple of days, so I decided to do a job that wouldn’t require too many skills. Can you say “jet lag”? No, I don’t have jet lag. I have something worse than jet lag. A husband with jet lag who thinks he doesn’t have jet lag. “Not jet lagged, dear? Yeah, so why are you waking me up early by cooking burgers at 6am? bahahahaha… “

Anyway, being a little tired, of course my simple project did not turn out as simply as it should have done. My project was to make a second throw-sized Love with a Twist sample quilt background for the B-series appliqués. After musing over far too many possible fabric combinations I eventually settled on the two batiks above. I loved them for their contrasts in colour, shapes, scale and visual texture. Rows of “stops” on a dark greyed blue-teal, and scatters of “star(ts)” on bright yellow/orange/pink. They are both name-brand fabrics. I gave zero thought to the weave or weight of either.

I did my usual pre-wash. Both were really quite colourfast for batiks – that’s good. But one of my batiks went really soft with the sizing removed. Oh so thin and delicate. Too soft. The other stayed a bit too rigid. Hmmm. Me thinks I am too spoilt using Island Batik fabrics all the time. After washing they reliably soften up, but are still easy to handle, their hand landing right in the sweet spot between that of my two new fabrics.

No matter, I cut my quilt pieces out, with mostly no trouble. To give you some indication of the fineness of the dotted fabric though, I accidentally caught the edge of it under where I was cutting and did this…..

…. I cut through two extra layers without even noticing. The first I knew was that there was suddenly a weird scrap of fabric floating around that should not have existed! Luckily I managed to have my accident in the small amount of extra yardage that would have been scrap anyway. Sweet! You can see it was a pretty close call though… less than 1/2″ from where I eventually cut my last block. You win some!

But then the sewing began. Well, I just can’t remember when I last had to pin batiks for basic piecing. But I had to pin these. A lot. The fabrics just would not stayed lined up under my sewing foot. Between the mismatched textures and the fineness of the one with the dots, the edges wandered something awful. Throw in a couple of errors with the print directionality, and the seam ripper saw far too much daylight for something so simple.

Thankfully I did win in the end. Here is my top ready to receive appliqués. I will use the yellow/orange/pink fabric to do a very basic border. I didn’t buy enough dotted fabric for a border of squares, but even if I had, I would have changed my mind. Too. much. trouble. Ever had a day like that?!

I needed to make this top so that I can test out the Love with a Twist B series Blocks before I make them out of Ditty fabrics. I can’t easily replace the Ditty fabrics from Island Batik, so I need something to make my mistakes on first. This will do quite nicely. After yesterday, I’m certainly not precious about it one iota!

In following my own pattern, I did discover an important typo in my original Love with a Twist Throw Quilt construction instructions. In Step 8 on Page 4, I told you to sew a 13″ strip between two 15.5″ blocks. What?! Of course you should totally use the 15.5″ strip I told you to cut in Step 4 instead. If you have already printed the pdf out, all you need to do is use a pen to correct the 13″ in Step 8 to 15.5″…. Otherwise, if you are storing the instructions electronically for later, you may want to re-download the corrected document here:

Make sure you delete the old one. Importantly, the cutting directions in the original file are correct, but I don’t want anyone getting confused. OK? Good.

Now, let’s have a look at some projects that hopefully went better than mine, linked up last week. But first….. a fun squirrel…..

Check this out for inspiring coincidence

Here’s some high-class balloon modelling that popped into my inbox overnight. That was good timing wasn’t it? There’s probably enough ideas here to do an entire balloon bird quilt. Certainly with the addition of the 5 balloon birds already featured in Love with a Twist! 🙂

Balloon Birds by Terry Cook Mimic Their Real-Life Counterparts

Now, back to core business…..

Features from the stack of inspiration in my Inlinkz dashboard

Rebecca Grace of Cheeky Cognoscenti linked up her pretty clamshell baby quilt plan.

Cheeky Cognoscenti is a new-to-me-blog, and a gem hiding in plain sight. Process and design focussed, there is a lot to take in on Rebecca’s site and I have quite gleefully added it to my ever increasing reading list. You might like to check it out too if you like seeing patchwork in progress, and enjoy a quilt’s journey as much as its finish.

Cherie from Cherie’s Quilting Journey also linked up her piece of Spring, with a hope that it might lift some winter blues. This is a disappearing Hour Glass quilt, another new-to-me discovery this week.

The Chameleon thought that he would like to help Cherie hurry Spring along a bit for you Northern Hemispher-ians….. by parachuting in some sunshine, courtesy of Rebecca Grace and her clamshells too. Heaven knows we have had plenty to spare!

Keeping things fair

I am assured by some of my Island Batik Ambassador friends that they would happily send me some snow to combat the ridiculously hot Summer that forgot to turn to Autumn here this week. So I am taking the liberty of grabbing some for the Chameleon’s return trip.

The Chameleon is dressed here in Denise’s colours from For the Love of Geese. Denise’s quilt is cool – not just because it is blue, but because it was 23 years in the making! You can read all about it’s journey to completion on Denise’s blog.

By the way, the Chameleon’s icy parachute is made of French Blue Snowflake from the current Island Batik fabric line Icicle.

Now it’s your turn to inspire us

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!

Party Guidelines

• 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!

[inlinkz_linkup id=817935 mode=1]

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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!

P.S. Joining in when I can at these fabulous linky parties: Midweek Makers, Main Crush Monday, BOMs Away, DrEAMi, Wait Loss Wednesday, Needle and Thread Thursday, Friday Foto Fun, Finished or Not Friday, Whoop Whoop Fridays, TGIFF, UFO Busting, What I made Monday, Moving it Forward Monday, Show and Tell Monday, Modern Patch Monday, Oh Scrap, Monday Making, Design Wall Monday, To-do Tuesday.

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!