Colour of the Month Block: Red

My local quilt shop offers several different courses in colour theory, but they've always seemed like a pretty big expense just to familiarize yourself with the colour wheel and ways of mixing prints. Besides, do I really want to make my colour choices in the same way that other people do? Probably not. Instead, I've decided to join in the Colour My World challenge over at Quilt Matters. Each month has a colour theme around which to create a quilt block.

One interesting thing I found out about myself since starting to quilt is that I love the geometric aspect of perfect piecing, but I get very bored making the same block more than once. In fact, what drew me to quilting in the first place weren't the traditional quilts with repeating patterns, but the crazy improvised quilts made without any concessions to symmetry. I've decided to use the colour challenge to experiment with different improvised piecing techniques. The goal is to make a quilt with a dozen colourful mismatched blocks at the end of the year.

For this month's red block, I sewed my red fabric scraps into strips and then joined the strips together into a square. Pink is close to red, so I threw some of that in too.

Next, I cut up my square diagonally and switched some of the pieces around.

I sewed the whole thing back together and ended up with a diamond shape, so I added some triangles onto the ends to square it up.

To finish up the block, I added a red border. In retrospect, I probably should't have used so much light pink, but despite that I really love how it came out!