A little bit of rain, a little bit of sun...

Back when the kids were little I used to take them to Mainly Music, and one of the songs was "It's a Rainbow" - perfect for this weekend (and last...). Officially spring has sprung, and while there's blossoms outside, it's still rather grey, cold and generally more miserable than I would like. Or maybe that has more to do with the cold I picked up?

"A little bit of rain, a little bit of sun, when they come together they make rainbow fun, it's a rainbow!":

Start with 5" and 6" 'solid' batik squares from my scrapthereapy-ed scraps...

... turn them into HSTs...

...group the HSTs into colours and randomly spread them across a 61 1/2" long column...

...then piece the columns with 1 1/2" wide sashing

The result is a bit larger than I had expected, 47 1/2" by 61 1/2" is more a throw than I baby quilt, but that's just the way it ended up - I definitely won't add anything else to it :) Now to decide on a quilting design - somehow I'm not keen on my usual 'all-over'; any suggestions? At the moment I'm thinking about making the coloured triangles standout more against the background. Given baby is due late spring, I'll back it with cotton rather than flannel or minky.

My Pfaff machine is still in sewing machine hospital (but due to come back soon), so the lovely Diane at our local sewing shop All you Needle lent me a little Janome which coped very well with the batiks - win!

I had spent a bit of time online, looking for the more fabrics to go with the Me+You Indah Batik Fabric Challenge. It was quite a challenge in itself to source the extra fabrics to go with what was supplied, but my selection of FQs finally arrived yesterday:

The four supplied F8s on top, my five solid FQs below

Not quite more normal colour palette, we'll see what happens... Nothing in the T&Cs indicates you can't blog about your challenge entry, but I might keep it a secret just in case :)

As for my goals from the last post:

• Bind, label & add hanging sleeve on Aotearoa: Nope, no progress yet (Mstr 14 asked me about it today actually...)
• Quilt VQR on S16: Working on it
• Continue quilting Metro Rings on S16: Trialled my new Surefoot with this, seems to work as the regular foot but at much less risk of the ruler slipping under the foot, exactly what I wanted yay :)
• Prepare the next set of Rainbow at Sea blocks: Papers are all prepared, now I have to cut the fabrics
• Continue on #Patchworkcity2018 blocks when my Pfaff has recovered: All pieces for the next block are prepared just need piecing.

Now to brave the weather and head into work to pack up the equipment I need for next week...

Happy Sewing!