Cheerful Orange: Colour Inspiration Tuesday and Linky Party

Welcome to the little Tuesday wedged in between my Sew Early 4 Christmas tutorial yesterday and our next Beary Colourful Bear pattern tomorrow!

Poor Tuesday! He had his big turn last week, with the Christmas in July blog hop…… but just because he is not the star of the Clever Chameleon blog this week doesn’t mean he can’t be inspiring.

He most certainly can!

Today’s blindingly bright colours are inspired by a little charity quilt that has just passed through my sewing room, cheering the place up as it went. I don’t know if I’d make myself a quilt in these colours, but it was nice to borrow them for a while. We all need a little cheering up occasionally. Let me brighten your day with this little orange quilt, another nice orange story from my week and a little look at the start I’ve made on my August Island Batik quilt.

Inspiration comes in many forms

I have been inspired by lots of things on and off the internet this week. Spring is threatening to arrive and we spent a couple of hours on Sunday tree-planting with our local community. This is the fifth year we have done this annual event….. here are some of our plantings this year.

 

and last year

and a few years earlier, around one of the remaining mature trees.

All are plants native to our area  chosen to support wildlife around our wetlands and build a biodiversity corridor. Seeing the older plants maturing and flowering reminded me that from little, sustained efforts big things can grow. Just like a quilt. Or a blog. Keeping at it regularly is key. And trusting that it will bloom when the time is right helps too.

My Sunday family adventures are in keeping with what’s happening in my sewing room. August’s Island Ambassador Challenge (with blog hop and prizes next month!) is themed “The Great Outdoors”. In Australia our outdoors is great….. maybe not so much in August in Adelaide, but each season has it’s merits. August here is often a good month to have outdoors come indoors, so working with floral fabrics is perfect. My allocated fabrics for the hop are the Victoria and Albert collection.

For my Great Outdoors quilt I have decided to make another completely altered version of another vintage quilt I spied while organising a design for my Shadows of Auntie Green quilt back in April. I’ll tell you more on Friday, to keep this post shorter than “War and Peace” but here are photos with captions of progress so far.

That’s it so far. I’d better get a wriggle on so that I’ve got time to quilt this the way I want to. It will be for my daughter’s bed…. since I my Regatta quilt is still a UFO. This new one has a deadline of the 15th August, so it’s a better bet for a timely finish.

My nice, cheerful orange story for the week

I hope you are aware by now that August is going to be all about yellow-orange in the 2018 Monthly Color Challenge series. It wasn’t planned, but it seems my orange month has started early……

My hubby returned from shopping on Saturday with two bunches of flowers in hand. He often brings me flowers, which is a very sweet and special gesture, but it’s generally only one bunch at a time. These orange ranunculi were his choice this week for his usual purchase.

But they came home accompanied by orange and yellow tulips. Nice story…. before we went away to Arkaroola recently hubby bought me flowers and accidentally left them behind in the store. We had a good laugh and moved on, being too busy with trip preparations to chase flowers. But the florist recognised him on his most recent visit and asked him if he’d ever come back for his tulips, which he hadn’t. So these tulips are a replacement bunch, free of charge from a business that cares. Thanks FlowerBar at Pasadena Green!

I love businesses who value good relationships with their customers and users. It is always one of the things I consider when deciding whether to recommend a product to you. Along with quality, price and ethical practices of course.

Yellow-Orange bear for August values good relationships too.

And speaking of people I know and admire…. well, I don’t actually know Beth of Cooking Up Quilts personally, but I have been following her blog for several years and she was my group supervisor for this year’s New Quilt Bloggers Blog Hop…….

Anyway, back in January, yikes…… is it really that long ago (!) Beth shared a tutorial for floppy feathers quilting that I’ve wanted to try ever since. She mentioned it again in a post a week ago and I suddenly realised that it would be perfect for this little charity quilt that has been waiting patiently in my sewing room.

This quilt came to me all pieced and sandwiched. My job in the chain of this charity quilting group is to quilt, trim and bind the quilts I get. And when I say bind, I really mean sew the binding given to me all pre-made onto the front and pass it back so another lady can hand sew the binding onto the back.

So here it is all quilted and bound, ready to move onto the binding finishing queue and then onto a hospice or hospital somewhere local.

And a close up of the quilting inspired by Beth Sellers…….

I was really pleased with how this motif looked and I got the hang of stitching it pretty quickly. It was fast too… perhaps the fastest design I now have in my repertoire. If you are looking for an easy feathers-based  all-over design for your next quilt that you could do on a stationary machine or a longarm, then I happily recommend Beth;’s floppy feathers tutorial to you.

And the back….. apricot and soft green.

I used Aurifil white 50wt thread given to me as an Island Batik Ambassador on both top and bottom. It is hard to see, especially in photos, which is exactly how Aurifil promised it would behave. Which is quite fine with me since I was trying this motif out for the first time.

But I think I will go back to using DecoBob in my bobbins, except on specific occasions where a cotton is warranted. I found the Aurifil thread broke a lot in the bobbin of my Sweet Sixteen and I got a lot of lint using it at high speed. And I had to keep winding bobbins. I had the same story quilting White Christmas, so I don’t feel Aurifil cotton is the right bobbin thread for me. But so far, I’m loving it on top.

Do you know who else inspires me?

You guys. Through your comments and quilt/sewing shares. Last week’s link party was HUGE in the history of the Chameleon’s link parties. I’ll finish my happy dance while you look at a few features…..

Here’s a rare non-blogger link….. If you are the owner of this link, thank you so so much for participating in our inspiration sharing. If you’d like to give me more info to share about you/your work, email me, we’d all love to see a bigger picture and have a thorough feature. No pressure though. And that goes for all of you wonderful quilter-readers who don’t blog….. let’s get some content sharing happening between  all you quietly clever chameleons in this community! You can even stay anonymous if you’re too shy. I’d be delighted to have a non-blogger to feature any or  every week!

The cheerful orange-theme feature has to go to Jeannette @quilted_collie on IG as the orange-est linkup this week. I have been following this project for a while and just adore all the texture. Well done on your finish Jeanette.

Lisa from Sunlight in Winter blog shared her Fireburst mystery quilt update. I love how crisp and accurate her flying geese units are so far. Wow!

And Vicki from Vicki’s Crafts and Quilting linked up her finished Pixie Squares quilt quilted with freehand feathers. The Chameleon and I am admiring this fresh modern quilt on lots of levels…. the pattern, colour, quilting…. love it all. 

My sincerest thanks to everyone who linked up last week. If you were featured you can find a badge of honour here.

And now, your weekly invitation to link up to the Chameleon’s Colour party and show us your projects……

What are you working on, or have recently finished in your sewing room? Link up a blog post, a Flicker pic, an IG post or simply a photo from your computer.  See if you can get the Chameleon to turn quilted with happiness. We’d love to see your quilting colours.

Guidelines (more detail here):

• Link up your latest or recent quilt excitement. All construction stages welcome.
• You have 100 characters in the link description…. tell us who you are and what your fantastic project is.
• URLs are not necessary to link up…. non-bloggers 100% welcome! If you don’t have a URL link up with just a photo. Then if you’d like to, you can send me an email about your linked work or add something in the comments, I’d love to know more about you and your project. 
• Do it now……. before you forget! 

[inlinkz_linkup id=791987 mode=1]

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Would you like to keep in touch with Clever Chameleon and the fun quilty ideas I design as well as find all over the internet? You can follow directly for email updates, or through Bloglovin’, Pinterest or FB. All your follow options can be found here. And don’t forget to link up all your current quilting projects on Tuesdays at our Colour Inspiration Linky parties!

The Chameleon turns rainbow with pleasure when he hears from you. I am more reserved, so I will respond in gratitude by email instead. Now that it’s your turn…. Scroll right to the end, leave me a comment and tell me, what do you think? Thanks for connecting!