Tula Palooza To you with love block and Economy Block

 Hello Everybody!

I seem to be in a pretty creative mood at the moment. And I decided to do some more on my other neglected sewalong, Tulapalooza. This is an Instagram sewalong using the fabrics of the peerless Tula Pink. Technically the sewalong finished at the end of 2019, and I was only doing a block a month instead of a whole quilt top a month, but I do want to finish off my 12 blocks so I can turn them into a quilt. I had managed faithfully until September, but things got away from me towards the end of last year, so I still had 3 blocks left to go. You can read about my previous blocks here; January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September.

But I now have got through another two blocks, so I only have one outstanding. Here are the October and November blocks.

October's block was using the To You with Love pattern, which is free on Stash Bandit's (Diane Harris) website.  It's a mini quilt pattern of little symmetrical hearts. Here's my fabric pull for it.

The red/purple is from Elizabeth, and the green is from Spirit Animal. Honestly, I'd forgotten I'd picked up a couple of Spirit Animal fat quarters, but I found this and purple one in the bag I was keeping all my Tula Palooza blocks in, so I decided to break into them right away. I fussy cut some astrolabes and birds from the Elizabeth fabric, and some bears from the Spirit Animal fabric. Here are my pieces cut out.

I didn't want to do a layout of simple hearts, so I did a quick sketch to highlight some of the other shapes.

I sewed all the half hearts together, and then played around to see if that was indeed the layout I wanted to go with.  Here are my other trials.

I liked the alternatives more than I expected, but still decided to stick with the original plan

It was clear by this point that I hadn't read the instructions properly. I had thought they said each heart finished at 6.5 inches square. So I thought 4 hearts together would give me a 12.5 inch block, comparable to the rest of the ones I'd made which are mostly 12-14 inch blocks. But, clearly the side length is half of that. Oh well, now I have a mini block. Here it is completed.

And on to November! November's block was the Economy block, which is a traditional and very easy block to do. Here's my fabric pull.

The owl fabric, from the True Colors collection was from a selection sent to me almost exactly a year ago during a #getyourquiltywishesgranted round on Instagram, by @lieblings_zeit (aka Ann-Kathrin). This is a fun, pay it forwards type arrangement, where you post about any particular fabrics or other quilty things you are looking for, and look to see if you can grant the wishes of anyone else by sending something from your own stash. I have received many lovely things through this, and been able to send out quite a bit to other people too. I had asked for scraps, so I just had a 10 inch square of the owls. I did my best to cut out my central square while still leaving as many owls in tact as I could for future fussy cutting.

And here are my pieces all cut out.  This block is so ridiculously easy to cut out, I can actually see how people might enjoy that part of the process (it's my least favourite bit)

The green is a Tabby Road print I bought at the start of last year, and the purple was the other Spirit Animal fabric I discovered when digging this project out.  One of the great things about Tula Pink's fabrics is she purposely uses a co-ordinating colour palette across all her collections, so it's very easy to mix and match between collections.

And here it is sewn together!

It's not my neatest job, in particular the points of the central block are not exactly pointy, but I do think the colours make for a nice impactful block.

I am starting to get an idea of how to lay these blocks out now. I am thinking of a layout inspired by Jen Kingswell's 'Gypsy Wife' quilt (stick that into Google or Pinterest for some very pretty quilt pics). For December, I am planning for the 'block' to actually be a long horizontal strip so that will sit at the top of the quilt, and the other blocks will come down in messy columns beneath it. I will probably need to make a few more small blocks to make it hang together nicely - the heart and economy block patterns lend themselves nicely to this, as does the Wonky Star pattern I did back in January. This idea totally works in my head, although I will need to manage some sort of make-shift design wall to actually work out the details.  I will need some sort of background/sashing/border type fabric. I am leaning towards one of the fairy dust prints, some stripes , some solids or maybe alternating two of those. And then having a scrappy border all the way around the outside to use up as many of my Tula Pink scraps as I can.

I hope to get onto December's block soon, although my sewing time has now been co-opted by a sudden last-minute inspiration to make something for my brother's 40th birthday next week. With any luck, that will be the next thing I post on here about.

Thanks for reading!