Micaela's block for November - Kaleidoscope

Happy Halloween everyone! It's hard to believe it is November tomorrow.

 This month we are doing kaleidoscopes. My inspiration was this quilt from Kitchen Table Quilting

 

I love the way that the circles just seem to pop out when you're not looking right at them, and the more you look at the quilt, the more you see! I’ll be asking you to do two slightly different blocks.

I followed the directions from the Kaleidoscope Quilt-along on the blog Don’t call me Betsy. It’s a great site - go on over and check it out!

For the fabrics, I chose light greys for the background and darkish pink, orange and a little bit of purple for the accents.  I hope most of you will have some greys left over from Shauna’s raw edge circles. The colours can be any pinks, oranges or purples- scrappy is great -  and they can be prints, solids, or whatever, as long as there is enough of a contrast between the light greys and the colours to let the overall pattern show through once the quilt is assembled.

 

My apologies - you will need to print out a template, but hopefully at least some of the kinks got worked out last month. Here is the blog post with the link to the template on it, and the direct link to the google document.

Have a look at those links and see if they are working for you, and let me know you can't access them. The trick again with these printed templates, at least in North America, is to choose “no scaling” when printing it.  The height of the triangle (actually a parallelogram because of its non-pointy top) when measured from the middle of the base should be 6.5 inches.  Let me know if you have issues with this – I can print out and send to you if that is just easier.

I made mine out of thin cardboard and taped it to my ruler so that one edge of the triangle lined up with the ruler. The taping wouldn’t work quite so well if I was cutting them out of scraps though.

Cut eight big triangles of your pinks/oranges/purples and eight greys. If you are doing them in a strip you can cut a 6.5 inch high strip and then flip the template over after each cut to eliminate wasted fabric.

 

Then cut eight small grey triangles. You can use the template for this, or just cut 4.5 inch squares and then cut them in half along the diagonal.

 

Lay them out into two blocks so that the colours and greys are alternating. Then here is where the two slightly different blocks come in. Add small grey triangles to the greys on one block...

and to the colours on the other one.

Having these two different blocks will allow for the cool pattern shown in the first picture to come through.

Sew the small triangles to their respective big triangles and press seams (open seemed to work the best for me, but whatever you are comfortable with). 

 

Then sew each of those to the triangle that is beside it to create 4 sections.  Press seams. Repeat the process to create two halves, and finally sew the block together.

 

 

The blocks should end up being  12.5 inches square.

Let me know if you have any questions!