Paintbox Quilt-A-Long

I'm participating in Oh, Fransson's Paintbox Quilt-A-Long. I ordered Kona roll-ups (which look like these, but were different colors) in several different colors from Fabric Depot when they were on mega-sale, but by the time I placed my order, they were temporarily out of stock. Lucky for me, they came back into stock, but I started out a bit behind.

The paintbox quilt blocks are supposed to be monochromatic with a solid and a print fabric in each block. I don't have enough print fabrics in my stash to make this work, which is the second reason I was behind. I didn't want to go out and buy new fabrics for this quilt because TD already thinks I have a fabric addiction.

And then, in steps my fabulous quilting friend CJ! She had ordered a bunch of fat quarters of various batik fabrics for me for Christmas. Apparently they took a while to get here, then I didn't see her for a bit, but we finally got together for a happy hour recently. I decided that they would be perfect for the paintbox quilt.

Here's the fabrics I'm working with, matched with solids from my Kona roll.

It's an interesting selection of colors, really. I'm not 100% sure how I like all the pairings, but some of them make me very happy.

The paintbox quilt instructions call for 40 different prints and 40 different solids. I don't have 40 different batiks, so I decided to use each batik twice paired with two different solid colors. I tried to use as wide a variety of solid colors as possible to get the "paintbox" look, which is supposed to be fairly rainbow-y.

Here's what my completed blocks look like right now. The goal is to complete 8 blocks per week. The week prior to January 11 was week 1. That means that by February 1 (this coming Monday - 4 sewing days from now), I should have completed 32 blocks. Right now, I have 16 blocks, so I'm halfway there.

So why do some of the blocks have black in them?

Well, sadly, this is due to a quilt fail on my part. The instructions said to cut the solid fabrics into strips 1.25" wide. I read that as 1.75" wide. This isn't a problem until the very last set of strips. They're just not quite long enough, and I don't have enough of the solid colors left to cut new strips.

I do have extra batik fabric, which meant that those blocks turned out as planned. I just couldn't bring myself to recut all the strips I'd already cut, so I had to come up with a something else. I was planning on sashing the blocks with black anyhow (I love the way bright colors look with a black background), so I decided that I'd just replace the too-short solid strips with black and not do a sashing. Or maybe I'll just do a sashing across the quilt and turn all those blocks with black edges so that they're upright so it will look like a complete sashing. Regardless, it's going to be substantially different than everyone else's paintbox quilt. Well, I wouldn't want to be too ordinary.