Colour Block of the Month: Grey

October's Colour Your World Challenge was to make a quilt block in grey. This worked out well for me, as I'd been wanting to experiment with ways to assemble a skyscraper for my urban quilt block collection.

I've been trying a new improvisational piecing technique for every month's colour block, and I decided to start this one off with strips of two grey fabrics. One selvage to selvage cut was just enough for two strips of each colour, and three striped ones.

I sewed all of the strips together into a rectangle, which was on its way to being skyscraper-esque, but still too blocky. I wanted the shape to taper slightly at one end to give the illusion of standing at the bottom of a building and looking up.

To create the tapered effect, I made a cut down the middle of each strip with a slight angle, so that each resulting piece was a tiny bit wider (1/8" to 1/4") at one end than the other.

It doesn't seem like much, but once I'd sewn all of the pieces back together with their larger ends together, the block did have the slight taper I was looking for.

I added some grey-on-blue sky to define the shape a little more, and squared up the block. Lastly, I added a grey border to match the previous colour blocks. And here it is, my slightly wonky, kinda-looks-like-a-building, grey block!

With the début of Leah Day's Free Motion Quilting a Sampler class on Craftsy, I now have a pretty clear idea of what I'm going to do with these colour blocks next year. But before we get to that, November's colour challenge is blue, so you can look forward to a TARDIS block very soon!