Today is my stop on The Traveling PicStitch Blog Hop organized by Laura from Quokka Quilts and Katy from The Littlest Thistle. Laura and Katy are on a road trip around Arizona, Utah and Nevada and they are getting inspiration from the beautiful scenery they get to experience on their trip to do some stitching along the way. And that is exactly the idea behind this blog hop: to use color from a photograph as inspiration to create an English Paper Pieced block.

The inspiration for my block is this picture I took last spring at the beach. I love the light and subtle blues and grays. I have never used a palette builder before so I decided to give it a try (I have to say: it is quite fun). I used the palette generator from Play Crafts and these are the results that I got:

Then I moved on to the fun part: choosing the fabrics. I found in my fabric stash these fabrics that matched the color palette very well (or close enough) and as a bonus they have a nautical theme. Perfect!

The design of my block is a variation of this star rose block. I started drawing the template with a star rose in mind, but halfway through I realized the pentagons in the center were larger than the original star rose I had seen, so I decided to keep going and call my design a happy accident.I haven't done much paper piecing before (a few months ago I haven't even heard of it) but I find this technique super fun. I'm already planning a large project involving paper piecing.

And this is my finished block. I guess I'm going to call it a star, it is going to become a pillow. I already appliqued it to a piece of natural linen and began the quilting. I will share it you once I finished it.

You can find more details about The Traveling PicStitch Blog Hop here, including the schedule with all the blogs participating, the sponsors, a Flickr group and information about a linky party a the end of November.

Please take some time to check out Monday's post from Beth @ Plum and June and Wednesday's turn is Nannette @ YeahImadethat (sorry the link on the schedule is broken, maybe when she sees this she will fix it so we can stop by her blog).

Thank you so much for stopping by and I hope to see you again soon!

*Update: You can see the finished pillow using the star block here.*

Martha.