The Easiest Lotto Block Ever!

This 6 inch by 9 inch 3-patch rectangle may be the EASIEST lotto block you will ever cut and sew, but . . . you may spend a little more time than normal this month thinking about color and could notice some interesting things about the true colors of your stash.

Mary Jane made this great example.

The block directions are here:

Three-patch Rectangles

COLOR/FABRIC GUIDELINES

Each block should contain:

1 blue fabric
1 green fabric
1 purple (or violet) fabric

In each case, the fabric may be a solid, tone-on-tone (TOT) print or a multicolor print that is mostly blue (green or purple) and would read as blue (green or purple) from across the room.

When you use colors that are adjacent to one another on the color wheel, it's called an Analogous Color Theme.  For this month, fabrics will be coming from the top half of this color wheel:

 

Notice that red-violet and yellow-green are covered--we will be avoiding those warmer versions of violet and green in our cool analogous colorway this month.

One more note about color ... I know that blues and colors containing blue are especially difficult to photograph accurately and that purples can appear as pink or red in photos and greens can seem yellow-ish, even when they are not.  It would be unfair to try to judge anyone's fabric choices by their photos–I trust you all to do your best to follow the color guidelines this month.

MAXIMUM NUMBER OF BLOCKS

You can make up to a maximum of 9 blocks for chances in the drawing on June 30.  If you are making multiple blocks, you may use the same fabrics in multiple blocks as long as each 3-fabric combination is UNIQUE.

BLOG POST LABELS

For your blog posts, please use as many of the following labels as apply:
3-patch - for any post about this month's lotto
June 2011 photos - for any post with photos of this month's blocks
 3-patch-mailed- when you mail your blocks to the winners at the end of the month
3-patch-received - if you are a winner and are posting about receiving blocks that have been mailed to you

THE VIRTUAL QUILTS (with some setting ideas)

First, thank you to all the sneak-peekers who sent photos of their blocks. You can see photos of 100 of the virtual blocks here: 3-Patch Rectangle Blocks
I believe I included blocks from everyone (though probably not ALL of the block photos), if you were left out, it is only a reflection of the randomness in which I grabbed images to use below.


While you can easily sew these rectangle blocks together in a straight set (no sashing), you could add more randomness to the layout by creating big 18 x 27 inch Rectangle units. Sewing a row of 2 wide blocks, over a row of 3 tall blocks, over a row of 2 wide blocks, then another row of 2 wide blocks.

One of these big rectangles is a table topper (or at least that's my plan for this month). Four big rectangles is a crib quilt (36 x 54 inches without borders); 9 would make a single bed quilt (54 x 81 without borders). Each resulting rectangular quilt top has the same proportions as the block.

Stacked along their long sides, with vertical sashing added, you could make a traditional (but very colorful) strippy quilt

            

             

             

             

            

             

            

For a clean, minimalist look, surround each of the blocks with wide borders in a solid neutral–simulated by white space here–and arrange them all with the same orientation:

               

                

                

                

                

I have a couple more idea which are easier to show by arranging blocks than arranging photos and dealing with html.  I'll include them when I post my blocks.