Sue Ross Whirligigs, Prickly Pears and other sweet delights (Part 2)

Lots of luscious fabric combinations appeared after a month of matching, cutting and stitching our blocks for the Whirligig quilt. 

Rae is using rich, mellow reproduction fabrics from her stash, and those stripes were the perfect choice to add drama to her outer cog wheel. Sunglasses on!  Here are Desley’s bright whirligigs in Kaffe Fassett fabrics that almost shout for joy! Janet’s pulling hers together by using the same print for all her cogs, but in different colourways.  It’s a tiny, Japanese white flower on a solid background of olive, dusty blue, deep red, black or taupe.  Nice!

Sue M’s whirligigs provided an opportunity for Sue Ross to demonstrate how to better combine our colours for greater effect. 

Take a look at the whirligigs in the left hand photo below, all of them beautifully colour-coordinated. 

Sue swapped around four of the outer cog circles, and (although it’s not easy to see here) showed us how the spreading around of colours, and combining unexpected hues, makes for a much more interesting quilt.

In short, perfectly matched blocks tend to look inwards on themselves, while unusual colour combinations, using colours from neighbouring blocks, create movement across the whole quilt.

Finally, here are mine, using lots of Kaffes, Philip Jacobs and Amy Butler fabrics, still waiting for their outer cogs.  

I’m revising my original plan and now think I’ll make up all my cog wheels, then audition them on different whirligigs.  It’ll be fun to see what surprises appear.

Of course I’d make faster progress if I wasn’t such a scatterbrain. 

I couldn’t  tell you how many times I did this (see photo at left), when I was hand stitching my first cog wheel yesterday…!   (Actually I could tell you, but I’d rather you didn’t think I was a complete idiot LOL).

Spot the mistake? 

More photos of others’ creative efforts after Sue’s final workshop with us next month.