How teal is teal? This is a question I’ve been pondering since I volunteered to make a block for the Tealed with a Kiss quilt. Kate blogs over on ‘Tall Tales from Chiconia’ and she regularly makes quilts to raise money for ovarian cancer, the colour representing ovarian cancer is teal. At the moment she is making and collecting blocks for a quilt entitled ‘Tealed with a Kiss’, so all the blocks have a cross within the design, so there will be lots of kisses.

I looked through my stash for some teal fabric and to my surprise I had very little. I’m surprised because it is a colour I like to wear, but I clearly haven’t seen many fat quarters I fancy in it. I remembered one I was using for my Splendid Sampler quilt, luckily I’ve nearly finished the quilt and there was enough left for a 12″ block. I found another one that coordinated and then found a scrap of cream cotton with gorgeous teal butterflies on. Cracked it, I thought…

Then I made the mistake of looking at the others that had been made, they looked a lot brighter than mine and I began to wonder where teal stops and turquoise began, or jade, or peacock blue…I’ve decided to make one up and let Kate decide, I have assured her that I won’t be offended if it’s made into a cushion instead 🙂 I’ll be keeping my eye open for brighter teals in future!

I found a pattern on the Aurifil website, it’s from one of their quilt-a-longs, I felt there was enough of a cross in this one. Kate had mentioned that she could do with some crosses with a teal background, so I used the butterflies and plain cream for the cross and the two teal (well I think they’re teal!) fabrics for the background.

The block design is 12.5″, Kate likes if poss a bit extra in case quilting takes up some width so I made the outer border 1/2″ wider than needed so it’s easy to trim to the required size.

So here is my teal block (I hope it’s teal anyway!!) it will be winging it’s way to Australia this week.