Seeing Red

Last night, I participated in the Friday Night Sew-In, hosted by Handmade by Heidi and Crafty Vegas Mom. I took the opportunity to start working on my Colour My World Challenge and made some very good progress. Must have been because red is such a stimulating colour, eh? 

Not sure how well you can see this, but here's my sketch for this month's red piece:

I'm trying to play with values of red so I chose eight red fabrics to make the main octagon block. Putting the strips side by side, it seemed to progress nicely from light to dark in my value viewers. However, once pieced together in the hexagon, I find there's quite a big jump between the white and red leaf print and the red and white leaf print. Oh well, I'm still really happy with it so far.

I started by tracing the centre hexagon, cut it out and then in half. I then paper pieced each half before sewing them together.

Centre hexagon, paper priced with
triangles of red fabrics

Once the centre hexagon was pieced, I adapted the technique that Madame Parfait used for her swirling hexagons to make a swirling octagon. Here is where I got to last night:

Swirling red octagon

While piecing the octagon, I pieced these leader/ender strip sets for my Chop Suey quilt. Hard to believe that sewing up this one octagon generated that many strip sets, but it did.

Chop Suey strip sets

Thanks Bobbi and Heidi for hosting such a fun FNSI!

Hope you are all having a great weekend!