Greetings guildmates,
Starting off this year’s block lotto focused on colour and value, I’ve chosen Sherri Lynn Wood’s floating blocks to demonstrate how scale and complementary colours causes the colours to pop.
In her book The Improv Handbook for Modern Quilters (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2015), Wood’s instructions for floating blocks is straightforward:
- Pick a “score”, in other words, a limited palette of fabrics.
- Free cut fabric into squares – no measuring.
- Sew together into units and then join units.
For our exploration of colour, I chose for this month a score of solid blue and orange, with a filler fabric of a warm white. I made most of the orange blocks smaller than the blue, the white has been used sparingly to make a piece fit onto a larger unit. You could do the opposite.
Please use solids of blue, orange, and white. In her presentation to the guild last month, Tara Faughnan said that colour gets all the credit but value does all the work. In the sample below you can see that the blue recedes and the orange comes forward. Once more blocks in various blues and oranges are joined, it will be interesting to see how the brightness of these colours is impacted when surrounded by other saturated colours.
Build a block and trim to 12″ square.
Mail your completed block(s) to Lorna Shapiro at 2726 W. 38 Ave, Vancouver, BC V6N 2W9. Mark on the back of the envelope “floating blocks”.
A change from last month: if you are sending more than one block and want to save on postage, please note the number of blocks in the envelope and Lorna will add those to the draw. 
Remember to post photos of your creations to IG with the hashtags #vanmqgbl21 and #vancouvermqg.
If you have an idea for a colour and value block lotto challenge, then I want to hear about it. All I need from the month’s block lotto author is a photo of your sample, a short write-up and either a link to a tutorial or written steps.
Niki Storr
@nikistorr