Improvisational Blocks- Irish Chain Twist Quiltalong

This has been a crazy week!  On Friday, my husband and I drove out to Austin (from Houston) and met my sister at the airport.  My sister and I had a quilt displayed at Quiltcon and we wanted to see it there!  We spent all day Saturday at Quiltcon and were totally exhausted.  On Sunday we drove back home, stopping at San Marcos outlets on the way- another exhausting day.  I took off work on Monday to spend some more time with my sister and she just flew home to Connecticut today, I was sad to see her go!

I will post more about our experience at Quiltcon next week, once I have a chance to go through all our pictures.  For today, I just want to show that I have completed my Improvisational blocks for the Irish Chain Twist Quiltalong at Happy Quilting.

It was (mentally) hard to cut these blocks wonky.  I noticed after I cut them that a lot of people did not do the wonky part... I decided just to follow the instructions and go for it.  I am sure that both ways will look great though!  I am continuing to enjoy this quiltalong and I am looking forward to this coming week's assignment!

Also linking up with WIP Wednesday at Freshly Pieced!

Sunrise Sunset at Quiltcon!

You already saw my two quilts that were rejected from Quiltcon, Star Power and Venn Diagrams.  However, you have not seen my quilt that got accepted and that is what I am going to share with you today!

My sister and I decided to make a quilt together to enter into Quiltcon.  I will give her full credit for the idea and a lot of the work, she is upset that I keep posting on here about "my" quilt that made it into Quiltcon :)  Anyway, she came up with the idea, I figured out the execution, we pieced the top together and then she quilted and bound it.  She also came up with the name "Sunrise Sunset". 

The quilt is basically two partial lone stars made out of solid diamonds.  The hardest part was figuring out how to piece in the black after we had the stars completed!  It is a beautiful quilt and the black makes the color pop so much.  It is because of this quilt that I am using black in the background for my Irish Chain Quiltalong quilt :) 

I am so excited because I am meeting my sister in Austin this weekend to go and see OUR quilt hanging at Quiltcon!  We are not taking any classes or anything, just visiting our quilt and enjoying the rest of the show.  Let me know if you see it there!

Irish Chain Twist QAL

Now that I cut all my fabrics for the Irish Chain Twist QAL, I can get started on sewing!  This week Melissa at Happy Quilting posted instructions for the "Improvisational Quilting Units" so that is what I worked on over the weekend. 

They are just basically strips with triangles sewed on each side- super easy to make even though there are 48 of them!  I have 8 blocks of each color in the rainbow.

I am looking forward to seeing what we will do with the blocks this week!

Quiltalong at Happy Quilting

Last summer I participated in my first ever quiltalong and I had so much fun!  I made a wall hanging of Texas, you can see it here. I have been looking around for another one to join ever since that one ended and I am happy to say that I finally found one!

Through another blog that I follow, I found out that Melissa at Happy Quilting is hosting an Irish Chain twist quiltalong.  I loved the way that the quilt looked so I decided to join in!  Luckily I was only a week behind so it won't take too long to catch up.

I quickly decided that I wanted to make the quilt "scrappy" and use my large supply of rainbow colored fabrics.  Then I made a bold choice and decided to go with black for my background, instead of my usual white.  I hope that it will really make all the bright colors "pop" in the quilt.

Here are my scraps, all cut and ready to go!  Other members of the quiltalong might notice that I did not cut the rainbow pieces for the square blocks.  This is because I am waiting to see what the construction method is (if I really need it cut by the WOF) so that I can make it even more scrappy :)

 I can't wait to start sewing!