Grey Grey Grey.

i've been obsessed with grey lately, which is killing me, really, because i can't use the term "shades of grey" without thinking of craptastic mommy porn.


it's funny because i've never been a big fan of grey, i actually refused to use kona medium grey for ages because i felt like it was sooo overdone within modern quilting.


but then i worked with grey fabric for Lysa's scrappy circle bee blocks, and then again for Cynthia's heart bee blocks, and i fell in love.


in the late spring i picked up a bunch of grey prints to use for my map quilt. i ended up not using them, but it was a great start to my grey stash. meanwhile, i went out and got a bunch of grey solids, which i did use for my map, and also used for the Age Not Attitude tote, for a pouch, for my Barb Mortell class, and for at least two other projects that i haven't gotten around to blogging yet. it's gotten to the point that everytime i go to the fabric store, i get made fun of for my constant grey search.


i've been dreaming about grey linen, which i haven't been able to find in the shade that i'm picturing... and i've been obsessing over the sad fact that i'd used every single scrap of Sherbet Pips in my strip quilts, and hadn't left myself any of the grey with white square/dots for my stash. i was seriously considering ripping some out of the baby strip quilt that i haven't quilted yet, i wanted some so bad! luckily, i found some on etsy, so now i'm just waiting impatiently for it to arrive.


random note - i think different spellings of grey signify different colours. is that weird? when i see the spelling "gray", i picture a warm gray, with a bit of a brown undertone, and when i see the spelling "grey", i picture a cool grey, sometimes with a bit of a silverish or blue undertone. can you guess which shade i prefer? i've never been a big brown fan!


so, given my new-found love of grey, i was super excited when i opened up my package for Cheryl's Unscripted Bee Block and found grey! Cheryl sent out bundles of fabric and a large paper hexagon and asked us to piece together the scraps to make a block the size of the template. she left it up to us how we wanted to sew the block, and i got it in my head to try something i'd been thinking of for ages, a hexagon made up of triangular log cabins. i folded her template up and made myself a pattern for the triangles, and they actually went together much easier than i'd expected.



as usual, i ran out of fabric. it's happened pretty much every month! apparently i use up more fabric with my propensity for complicated blocks. i messaged Cheryl and got her go-ahead to add my own fabric, since i had some grey in my stash already. of course, i still needed to go shopping for more....



within the package Cheryl sent, there were a few different shades of grey (and gray!). i really loved the stripes, but i was having a hard time pulling the warm shades in with all the other cooler greys. luckily i found this herringbone fabric when i went shopping, along with a few others, and that really fit them together. this block made me appreciate the warmer grays more, though i'm still loyal to the grey-grey that i love!



for my signature block, i wanted to echo the hexagons that will make up the front of the quilt, so i started with a hexie and added strips around it. i embroidered my name, again using the FriXion pen to write my name first. the white marks will wash out, but they're still annoying.


in addition to all of the bee blocks that i've been working on, i really wanted to sew up a few blocks for the VMQG july challenge, because i was too busy to do some of the challenges in may and june. and since the challenge was to make improv blocks with grey and black solids, it wasn't particularly a hardship!



i just used scraps for these, because as usual, i couldn't find my yardage of black kona (there's a black pit in my house that eats it, i think), so they ended up with more grey than black, but i think that's cool. the inspiration quilt has a good variety of darker and lighter blocks, so it works.




i have yet more bee blocks to post, but i'll do those another day. i told you i had a backlog of things to post!



in other news, cross your fingers for me that i'll get into the classes i want for QuiltCon!

due to a giant clusterf*ck (aka some sort of system error), their website refused my registration at least 4 or 5 times, but told me that it was my credit card's fault, and by the time i finally got off the phone with my bank and realized that the problem was the site, not my credit card, i was practically hysterical. (i was also super sleep deprived because i got up HELLA EARLY to register, and i'd been up late stressing about registering, so i was a bit over-emotional!) through my tears i discovered that two of the three workshops i wanted were waitlisted - though they'd still been available when i tried to register at 7:03am.

i e-mailed quiltcon, there were some tweets back and forth, and then i got an e-mail that they're looking into it, but of course, we just had the long weekend, so i won't hear anything more until tomorrow at the latest. i saw other folks tweeting about problems as well, so i'm not sure what they're gonna do!

it would really suck to have registered for a class, and then be told that they're removing you because of a system glitch, but it also really sucks to not get the classes you wanted, even though they were available when you tried to register! i'm hoping that they'll put the people who got the system errors at the top of the waitlists or something, that seems like the fairest option.

are you going to Quiltcon? did you get the workshops you were hoping for?