Friendship Medallion - Part 6

There's not much to say about Part 6. It's large blue and white half-square triangles added to the top and bottom of this square quilt, making it a rectangle. It's 67-1/2" X 76-1/2" now, with two more parts to go.

Part 7 will no doubt take a little time. Hmm, only 288 one-and-a-half inch white squares, and  360 one-and-a-half inch medium and dark squares to make 72 three-inch square (finished) Nine Patch blocks!

To be perfectly honest, I've had a happy accident, and am further along on Part 7 than I would have expected. You see, in October I decided to make my first ever "Leaders and Enders" project. If you don't know what this is, go here to Bonnie Hunter's site to read more about it.

Basically, it's a way to make a quilt while you're working on something else. You only need to have a whole bunch of fabric pieces cut out so that you can start (leaders) and end (enders) every seam of your current project with Leaders and Enders pieces to sew together. It's a secondary quilt to the primary quilt (or project) you're working on.

This is the basket of 1-1/2 squares I've been cutting for several months as I have systematically been working through my fabric bins to downsize. These 1-1/2" squares in my rectangle basket are the smallest ready-to-sew size I've been cutting before tossing scraps into a bag.

The Leaders and Enders patches I started sewing together in October are 1-1/2" squares. I've already sewn heaps of pairs and tossed them into this round basket.

So all those 1-1/2" cut squares - in the rectangle basket - are exactly the size needed for the 72 Nine Patch blocks in the Friendship Medallion quilt! How fortuitous is that?! I'm tickled about it because in just a couple days I've gotten a good start on Nine Patch blocks that will look like this for Part 7 of Friendship Medallion. It's a Nine Patch in a Square.

5-3/4" X 5-3/4" unfinished

Have I mentioned before how much I'm lovin' this project?! I think so. Hmm, maybe once or twice.

The colors! It's amazing to me how all my old traditional prints - many purchased in the 1980s and 1990s - look almost modern when neighbored with bright colors and a white (mostly) background. They play well together, and I love these color groupings.

Something else that's fun to do and might make you happy too... A dear friend sent me the link to a color test - a hue test - which I found quite interesting. I'm happy to say I scored perfectly, a zero. To take the hue test yourself go to: FM 100 Hue Test. I recommend you're in in a well-lit area when you take it.

What this test tells me is that even though I can perfectly line up a graduated series of hues, when it comes to choosing colors of fabrics to go together, I can still fail miserably. But maybe this Friendship Medallion is an exception. That remains to be seen. Linda