Kaleidoscope Quiltalong Progress

This last few days has been all about catching up with the Kaleidoscope Quilt Along. I'm pretty please with where I've gotten to and should be fully caught up by the time Elizabeth posts the next set of instructions on Thursday.

By this afternoon I have half of the blocks for this quilt fully finished, and the other half pretty far down the road. I found it a bit difficult at the start to envisage how this was all going to work and flow together, never having tackled a project like this before, but the Flickr group has been really great to provide inspiration and, together with some great ideas and hints on design from Elizabeth, I am really loving how this quilt is coming together.



I'm doing the baby quilt size for a friend who asked me at the start of the summer to make one for her soon-t0-arrive baby, and I'm hoping that this will be a hit with her for baby O's room. I decided to use some of my nicest boy's novelty prints in variations of 3 strong colours - blue, green and red. I did doubt at one stage that it was all going to work, but decided to go the monochromatic route rather than mixing it up and have fallen in love with it.


I must admit that I have gotten to be best buddies with my seam ripper (and found a few new choice phrases!) in sewing up these blocks, mostly through my own stupidity (i.e. getting too excited and rushing ahead without checking my layout and sewing the wrong pieces together). I've also struggled to get my points matching up precisely on a few of the blocks which is a bit frustrating - this one has been ripped back and resewn about 5 times and this is the best I can get it. I know it doesn't look too bad in the photsos but the points are definitely NOT matching!


This one caused me some heartache too! But I figure that the little imperfections will get lost in the overall effect once I have it pieced together. It's actually reassuring to realise that they don't look as bad even already in the photos! I'm also trusting that the centres of the blocks will flatten out when its all together and quilted. Despite trying to press it into submission with my iron this afternoon, it was not playing!


Here's the layout for the top half of the quilt - isn't it fun? I really like the colour blocks and how the colour moves across it. It definitely draws the eye in.


Fingers crossed that piecing the rest of these goes reasonably smoothly:


I can't wait now to get it all together! I'm linking this up to

and