We’ve just had a lovely holiday in Cornwall, just over a week, the week before was a mad rush trying to get things finished, I had a few deadlines, some I managed, some I didn’t! Since we returned it’s been a mad rush trying to get ready for visitors at the weekend, we’ve family coming to stay ( Aussies with tickets for the Ashes match at Headingly!) so guest bedrooms to sort, food to organise, house to tidy…and I’m back at work! Deep breath…life will settle down soon!

In the meantime, here’s a quick post about the last block I made for Kate’s ovarian cancer quilt. This is one deadline I was determined to make before I went on holiday. The quilt is going to be auctioned for her local charity, teal is the colour for ovarian cancer and Kate always thinks of a theme with a pun on the word teal, so this year it’s ‘Teals on Fire’ so lots of wheel shape blocks and fiery colours to go with the teal.

The first block was this one…

I’d bought a set of teal fat quarters on Etsy and also spotted a wonderful ombre fabric in yellows and orange, I only needed to buy quarter of a metre to get all the wonderful colours, and really fiery they are too.

For the second block I decided to do a quarter of a wheel using the centre template from my Down the Rabbit Hole quilt, for those of you without memories going back several years, here’s the centre…

So I made a strip of alternating orange and teal stripes and cut them up using the DTRH wedge template, which I happen to have spotted amongst my templates a couple of weeks before, perfect timing.

With the stripy bit made, I could then cut out wedges in a darker teal and stitch them all together to make a quarter circle. My lines didn’t line up very well, one line was worse than the others so that one was unpicked and realigned with a bit of an improvement. However it was at the bottom where the discrepancies showed up the most with the end of the orange segments, though looking at the purple circle above, the central ones aren’t perfect and it doesn’t show up much. With this one being fiery orange, it showed up!! So I used a slightly bigger circle so it would cover the offending ends.

At one stage during the making of the block I did wonder about making prairie points round the circle, but I decided it would mess up Kate’s quilting and when I tried a few triangles around the edge, planning to stitch them down, it actually looked a bit much. Instead I stitched the wide orange border, I felt very brave (or reckless!) at the time as I cut it out as an arc and then stitched it on the machine, stitching curved seams on quilts is usually enough to send me into a panic so I was relived when it all fitted OK first time. The bias teal strip was also stitched initially on the machine and then hand stitched to the background.

I did wonder about adding a little something in the opposite corner but nothing I thought of really worked so I left it with the teal feather batik. I’m pretty pleased with how it came out, especially considering the design changed a bit as I went a long, I’d hoped that the wedges would come out bigger but looking at the Down the Rabbit Hole one again, I do wonder if the wedges were cut from higher up the template as I lost two rows under the central circle, hindsight is a wonderful thing!

The blocks have now arrived in sunny Australia, 10,000 miles isn’t bad in two weeks! Kate has just published a post with the initial layout of the quilt and it does look amazing. There’s some wonderful New York Beauty blocks in there too, I might just have to make one of those quilts sometime in the future! Please follow the link to Kate’s blog to see all the Teal’s on Fire quilt in the making.