WIP Wednesday: Spicy hot goings on!

Lots of works in progress this week, but not too much progress made on any of them.  As I mentioned Monday, we're doing a bunch of stuff in the house while we're finishing the studio, so most of my time is spent moving furniture or baking as a thank you to Mike who's been super awesome about painting.

However, I did want to show one in progress project I started over MLK weekend.  It's a three-dimensional super textured chile ristra quilt.  I'm mostly following a pattern I got from my friend Evelyn, and even though I don't often make quilts from patterns I really loved the look of this one.  The pattern is called Chili Peppers by Arlene Walsh Designs.  Anyway, you make the background and borders first, then quilt it and bind it and put the chiles on last, so it's not too exciting to look at in the beginning.

I made a sort of sawtooth HST border using red-green-orange strip sets instead of the blocky border in the pattern and used a linen for the background.  The red piece you see on the background is called the "under chili" which I think is fabulous because it reminds me of someone's grandmother giving a lecture about proper foundation garments.  It's purpose is just so you don't see linen color through the chiles on top.

I marked a brick pattern in blue water soluble pen as a guide for my FMQ and had barely started quilting the bricks when my sewing room was torn asunder by the abovementioned  house chaos.

In the pattern they say to use red fabric for all the chiles since that's what color chile ristras usually are, but I thought that would be too boring for me.  I almost went with sort of a rich pink with red undertones, sort of chiles-done-in-brights, but then I decided it would be a good challenge for me not to work in brights.  I therefore decided to use muted realistic chile colors but multiple colors (red, green ,and orange) as a compromise against boringness.

I hope to get back to this soon, but I've signed up for some swaps so I think those will have to come next if I can ever unbury my sewing stuff!