It's Time for Teal

Teal is the color used for the Trudy Crowley Ovarian Cancer Foundation in Australia. For the last twelve years Kate at talltalesfromchiconia (and our hostess for Scrap Happy Day each month) has been assembling a quilt to be raffled off to raise funds for this organization. She always comes up with a pun for the title of the quilts. This year the quilt is called Tealing All Our Stories. To illustrate that theme she asked for contributions of bookshelf blocks. 

I've made blocks for several of Kate's ovarian cancer quilts and have always been happy to do so. This year was more of a challenge for me. I've never made a bookshelf block. To an experienced quilt maker it shouldn't appear all that difficult. Mostly the books are spines represented by strips of different prints. However, I found this year's brief intimidating. I wandered around online - mostly on Pinterest - to see what other makers had created. For those who applique or paper piece there are a lot of really cool things you can add to your bookshelf. That didn't necessarily help mitigate my intimidation! 

I committed to making two blocks for Kate. I began with something I'm familiar with and that I thought would lighten up a bookshelf: a cat.  

 I was able to fussy-cut the word Friends out of one print to use as a title on one spine. The word London was already on the fabric I cut that spine from. (I did not do a good job photographing these blocks.)

One of the things I like to do with the prints I buy is to fuss-cut bits out of them for specific purposes. In this case, I used portions of prints as the whole spine.

 Kate said she would add titles (names of the makers or people they would like to dedicate their blocks to) on some of the books so I left a couple of blank spaces for that on two of these books. 

Now that I was in the appropriate mindset I decided to try for a couple more blocks. I found a small panel - the interior of each block is only ten inches square - that I thought could either be a framed sign in the shelf or even the very tin standing on it's side on top of a couple of books.

 

 

One final block involved appliqueing labels onto the spines, just to prove I could do it.

 The idea was to use a dark teal for the back of our shelves and as much teal as we could manage for the books. Every block is framed in cream so the quilt top will look something like this (only much better!):

 I encourage you to hop over to Kate's blog to see some of the other blocks she has made or received pictures of so far. They are impressive. 😊