Tale of Two Cities

When choosing a book for 2016, my modern quilt club was pretty much equally enthusiastic about two books.

Patchwork City by Elizabeth Hartman won out by one vote.  I'm going to make one of my city quilts with the fabric in this cubby.

The Modern Medallion Workbook is the alternate book.  I'll probably make something from it eventually, but for now I have a second city planned from the fabrics in this cubby.

Let's get a better look at these fabrics.

This is the starting point for one.  You can't really tell, but there's a slightly patterned white fabric on the left side, in the background.  What I like better is the white on the right - Modern Background in silver/white from Moda's Zen Chic line.

The main fabrics are going to be from the layer cake and charm pack on the left, both of which are For You, also from Moda's Zen Chic.

This looks like a pretty disparate group of fabrics, but I think I can make it work.

This fabric is the starting point for the second city quilt.  I must like Moda fabric - I'm using a charm pack and candy pack (or whatever you call the really little squares) of Block Party.  The orange geometric in the upper left and the grey/aqua floral in the upper right are also part of that line.

At the bottom is a Cotton + Steel line called August, which I bought back in 2014.

See the grey oval fabric in the background?  Hold that thought.

One of these cities will have a cool feeling; the other will be warm.

I love this Patchwork City book - there are 75 different blocks in three different sizes.  Yesterday I made one of each size, from my warm city.

This is an 8" x8" block, named Donut Shop.  (All the blocks in the book have names related to some aspect of a city.)

I fussy cut lions from the Cotton + Steel fabric.  Whenever the pattern called for a 2.5" square, I used one of the candy pieces.  All of the blocks are going to have the happy grey floral.

This 5" x 14" block is named Coffee Shop.  Lots of fussy cutting here.  

You can just barely see cream linen strips at the top and bottom.  My plan was to put that color in every block, along with the grey floral.  But that was back when I planned on using the grey oval fabric (time to retrieve the thought I told you to hold) as sashing between the blocks.  Once I had some blocks made, my happy grey floral wasn't coexisting very peacefully with the grey ovals.  I've now picked a dark cream text print for my sashing.  I don't feel like taking a picture of it right now, so you'll have to see it later.

The point of all that is I'm going to replace those cream strips with something else, because right now they blend in too much when I lay the block on my new sashing fabric.  I want my 5" x 14" rectangles to look nice and big, so I can't have any disappearing going on at the edges.

And here's the 5" x 8" block, named Raindrops.  Lots of opportunity in this block to use my candy squares.

So that's what I have so far.  My original plan was to make these quilts in a parallel fashion.  Meaning I now should go and make these same three blocks in my other city fabric.  But I don't feel like it.  I'm going to stay with my warm city until it's done.  I don't know how many of the blocks I'll make for each quilt.  And I might make different ones for each city.  I'll find out as I get there.

At my modern club this morning, lots of people had started their quilts and brought their blocks in.  They are ALL gorgeous.