Scrappy QAL

I recently bought Amanda Jean Nyberg's new book, No Scrap Left Behind. It's a fabulous book with fantastic scrap quilts. A couple of weeks ago, she started a quilt along featuring one of the quilts from her book called "June". I joined in planning to use up some dark scraps. I typically make quilts with bright fabrics and scraps, so this would be a nice change.

A few blocks in I just didn't like it. It was too brown and sort of reminded me of chocolate ice cream with dark chocolate syrup poured over it - kind of sickly sweet!

So I sent a photo to a friend and asked her opinion. Her son happened to be sitting right there and suggested that I replace the small brown squares with olive green squares. I found the closest solid fabric I have to olive green, tried it and loved it!

The next roadblock I had was spending too much time trying to pick the next string for the block I'm working on. It was taking so long to make the blocks that I figured I'd still be working on this quilt next June! I commented on a blog post (quiltingismorefunthanhousework.blogspot.com) how fast the author whipped out her blocks. She said she chain pieces the strings in pairs, then chains the pairs together and then the "fours", until she has the right size. With this advice, I blazed through my blocks and had half done that same day.

The rest went equally as fast and now I'm all caught up (thank you Cynthia!) and my blocks are ready to be sewn together.

If you want more info on this quilt along, visit Amanda Jean's blog, crazymomquilts.blogspot.com or Instagram #junequiltqal.