Pickle Dish Palette and Pink Donation Top

After lots of playing in EQ7, I selected a dense floral for the background of my Pickle Dish project, and coral, aqua, olive, and soft gold for the accent colors. Armed with the EQ print-out, I went shopping. The background print is Menagerie from Rifle Paper Co, which has a deep hunter green ground.

Some of the accent colors came from stash, others are new, so my stash report will take a hit this month. The olive is a placeholder, a scrap from stash. It's the perfect shade of Grunge which I bought locally a couple years ago, but none of the local shops have this shade now and I don't know the color number. I'll have to search for something that will work. The black & off-white dotty prints are for the corner squares. I'm also using a variety of low-volume neutrals are from stash.

This is the EQ plan:

This will be a long term project. My plan is to paper piece all the arcs, cut all the background pieces (scissors cut from templates), lay out the parts on the design wall, and confirm the color placement before I actually put blocks together, because once the colors are paired up and sewn into a block, I can't move them around.

So I've been paper piecing arcs, in batches of four so I can chain piece. Four arcs make a ring, so it's working out well so far.

There's 8 seams per arc and I'll need 72 arcs. Even with chain piecing four arcs at a time, that's a lot of starts and stops. When I made the test blocks a couple weeks ago, I was only making one or two arcs at a time, also a lot of starts and stops. That's a lot of leaders and enders.

One of my goals this month is to use up some stash for a donation quilt top. Earlier I had cut squares of a lot of pinks. This helped get rid of some partial FQs and some scraps, and I also cut strips from yardage. After laying out the squares on the design wall, I clipped them together so I could use them for leader/enders.

A few dozen arc seams later, I had all the patches sewn into rows for this little donation top. Then it was simple to just sew the rows together and get it finished. It's 44" square.

It hardly made a dent in my stash, but that's OK. I'll cut some more squares for another donation top and continue to use them as leader/enders as I continue piecing the arcs for the Pickle Dish project.

So since I have this little top finished, I'm linking up with Friday Finish at Crazy Mom Quilts and Whoop Whoop Friday at Confessions of a Fabric Addict.