Meg's blocks for Katy

Hi everybody -- First of all, thank you all so much for the 'Ocean Waves' blocks.  The quilt will be so beautiful; I can hardly wait to see it all together!  Some hardy souls sent the full four sub-blocks in and others did a wonderful job with two sub-blocks.  Almost everyone sent in extra HSTs or extra squares and I so appreciate that -- the border is full of them and I hadn't really thought this through but it's so great to have the fabrics in the body of the quilt also in the border.

Today was gray, cold and rainy in Canada -- perfect day to tackle Katy's block.  I have to say that I think this was my favorite project of all and so here's my recap of the experience.  (Bad news is, I can't find my camera.  I put it in a 'special' place -- so I could take more photos of the dog -- and apparently it's so special that I can't find it at all.  Ugh.  If we don't have a Bee Buzz question of the month, maybe this could be it:  What have you hidden that you didn't find until years later?)

So....I went through my stash and carefully chose a beautiful balance of fabrics that hit all of the values and matched each other.  BUT.  I have a value finder, courtesy of Kathy Doughty at Material Obsession in Sydney.  For those of you who haven't seen one of these, it's a very simple-looking square of dark red plastic.  If you look at fabric through it, it removes the color and leaves you with a value reading only.  Every time I look through it, I'm amazed at how my brain reads value incorrectly.  "Bright" equals "dark/medium" in my mind and in fact, there are many very bright colours -- like hot pink -- that appear rather saturated to the naked eye, but will actually show up in your quilt as a very "light" piece.  Anyway, after using the value finder, I re-sorted a few of my squares, then set about sewing.

I don't want to toot my own horn too much (especially with the mysterious absence of any pics!), but I am BEYOND happy with the results.  I'm normally a 'matcher'.  I find I just cannot tear myself away from Kaffe Fassett, because everything matches so darned well.  But for this project, I stopped thinking so hard and just pulled squares from the value piles.  I got some great combinations -- fabrics I wouldn't have thought to put together.

Katy, I'm sending 16 small blocks.  I will sort them into two baggies -- the first 12 blocks have 'naked eye' value differences.  The other 4 blocks look absolutely stellar through the value finder, but to my eye look like two mediums sewn together.  Will be interesting to see if the 4 extras end up being unusable or having that wow factor.  I also have called a couple of shops here, looking for a value finder to send you.  The women I talked to know exactly what it is, but I haven't actually found one.  I'll keep looking, but for everyone -- if you see one, it's worth the $3 or so to buy it.

Sorry for the extra long post, but I really did enjoy this month's "work":)  xo Meg