October in the Scrap Patch

Our pumpkins are all picked, sorted and most of them have been given to family. I think we'll make a quick weekend trip up to Idaho in the next week or two to visit daughter Emily and family who moved there from Colorado just before school started.  Our garden has nothing left in it but three tomato bushes who haven't read the memo yet that autumn is here. They're still producing, and so we'll keep picking tomatoes until we can't. But the patio furniture is going into hibernation this weekend. I'm ready.

I also plan to decorate the house for autumn this weekend. First, however, I want to finish the pumpkin wall hanging I'm working on. (Punkin' Patch from String Frenzy by Bonnie Hunter).  The pumpkin blocks are all sewn and in formation. I used lots of gray scraps for the background. The green patchwork border is all sewn together, and the top border is attached to the quilt. The sides and bottom are just pinned. Finishing up the border won't take long, then I can sandwich the whole thing up and quilt it. Oh, and then bind it and add a hanging sleeve. I'm pretty sure I can finish today. It should measure about 28x42".

The backing will be one of these three orange fabrics. The center one is my favorite, and the one on the right is next favorite. That's why I probably won't use them. The method to that madness is that I'll save them for the front of a gender-neutral kids quilt. So I'll probably use the one on the left. I'd like to have some bright orange binding, but I'll check to see what I have for that. It may end up green or gray.

For October, the colors selected for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge are dark neutrals; black, gray, brown. I dug in my scraps to get the gray backgrounds for the Punkin' Patch quilt above, but otherwise haven't sewn any of my ongoing RSC blocks yet. I've got the rest of the large drawerful of  black and gray scraps roughly sorted by value, with the strings in separate piles. Next, I'll tackle my brown drawer and combine the two. I think I'll have enough to do at least two, possibly three quilts. But in the meantime, we can all hop over to the Scrappy Saturday post because there's always lots of good scrappy inspiration there!

From these scraps, I'll first do the tumbler blocks for my Gumdrops rainbow tumbler quilt of fabric and selvages. That'll give me time to select a quilt pattern or two for these scraps. I'm thinking of a Jacob's Ladder-type quilt (HSTs and 4-patches) with dark/light values for one of the quilts and some sort of string quilt for the other. After that, I may just make crumb blocks and alternate them with some wild colors or multi-colored prints and play on the design board. A lot of creative possibilities to look forward to!

Cousin Kim and I joined a Block of the Month class at one of our local quilt stores. I don't think I've shown my first block(s).  The purple one is for the class (their fabrics) and the multi-and-blue one is a second block I made for a potential kids quilt. I have a lot of that print fabric and will just follow along with the BOM blocks and add a second one for this quilt.

Have a beautiful autumn weekend everyone! Unless you're in the Southern Hemisphere (Jenny, I know YOU are) - then have a nice spring weekend!