Tea Party for Penny Sampler

I'm back at work on my Penny Sampler.  The final segment of the quilt is mostly paper piecing.  I jumped ahead to the tea pot block, eager to put some color in the center of my quilt!

My tea pot block contrasts Anna Maria Horner's saturated green with that solid Freespirit Pomegranate.  Together with the royal blue corners, these colors are very much what I imagined for the quilt when I was originally inspired by stained glass in a church.

I've spent so much time working on the dark borders of the quilt, that I sometimes feel I lost track of my color scheme.

So my next step was to choose fabrics for the remaining center blocks.  I auditioned fabrics for probably an hour before settling here.  I also moved two 6" blocks, relocating my darkish mitten and crossroads blocks to the border so that I could make room for both tea cup blocks in the center section of my quilt.

And here are my tea cups!  Love, love!  They are such fun to make.  Ok, the handles are not fun to make, as they have a trillion parts, but choosing fabrics for cups and saucers is such fun.  Gosh, wouldn't a whole quilt of cups would be darling?  I did simplify the handle on the blue floral cup, giving it sharper angles.  I like how that worked out. If I were to make them again, I'd choose to use white for the rim of that cup though.  I used a medium blue that doesn't show up with the saturated Friedlander blue background.  Live and learn.

I'm going to keep working on this quilt this week.  More paper piecing to come!