I am back from Japan and enjoying settling into fall with the cooler weather helping set the mood here in the Bay Area.  Once fully caught up on work and projects, I intend to get a post out with all my Japanese fabric purchases but that is for another day.

In the meantime, after the jet lag was behind me, I set out to catch up on my Fall into a QAL block 10, Patchwork Pickles which was designed by Sandra Healy.  Of course I am in love with this block.  One of the first things I did on landing back state side was to check the status of my tomatoes, and weren’t they in a state of canning readiness!   So it was appropos, for me anyway, to see this block appear in the line up.

I opted for a low volume background rather than pure white, mostly to represent the herbs and seeds that I normally pickle with.  The canning backgrounds also work better with the other blocks in this QAL such as Mr. Turkey.

Pears are my fall favorite fruit, and I love all pear types, including D’Anjou as well as the Bosc pears.  I also opted to make a suite of colors to represent my favorite types.  Fall shadows showed up in my lunch photo session but hey, fall is what this quilt is all about.  And it seems I lost a stem on one of my pears.  I suppose I would catch that when I sew the appliqued shapes down right?

I took the time to fix it, and adjust my carrots to my liking.  Much better with the yellow carrot in front of the others.  Such a pleasing block!

I couldn’t resist adding a blend of purple, orange and yellow carrots also representing my favorite bunch to buy – rainbow carrots.  My garden carrots while quite small, are quite sweet.

Can’t believe there are just two blocks left.  I had time to complete one of my two pumpkin blocks.  They sure are fun to make.

Finally, I am piecing together my leftover HSTs from various previous blocks.  Here’s a sneak peak of what I’ve done with some of them.

You’ll have to wait to see what’s next for these little guys and how they will fit within this quilt.  I may have hinted that I want to have 16 squares to make the quilt larger.  So I’ve duplicated a couple of the designer blocks and hope to get one more done soon.  More to come on that later!

Thanks for stopping by.