Redwork without the work

I have collected a few red and white fabrics recently, and have plans to make a red and white quilt.  Oftentimes I see red and white quilts combined with redwork, but I didn’t see myself actually doing any redwork embroidery.

Today, while at a quilt show, there was a whole vendor’s booth devoted to redwork and bluework of all kinds.  A closer look revealed that they were selling pre-embroidered redwork squares.  I bought a package of six 5-inch squares with birdhouses as a theme.  This is the pattern that caught my eye:

This was another one I really liked:

Here’s the set of 6, and how they looked mixed in with some red/white fabrics:

I would like to make a small wallhanging, inspired by this quilt called “"Redwork Dreams” that was in Quiltmaker in the Fall of 2008.

Here is the craziest thing about me planning to make a redwork quilt.   A few years ago our quilt guild had a challenge where we had to use a technique or style that was assigned to us.  Various quiltmaking techniques and styles were written on paper and we had to draw one from a hat.  I picked “redwork”, but it was something that I had never done.  To be honest, it seemed a little unbalanced that some people got styles like “log cabin”  or “1930’s reproduction”  which may have posed a design challenge, but did not require them to learn how to do hand embroidery.   Sad to say, I totally embraced my inner wimp and ended up not entering the challenge.  But now, with these pre-embroidered squares, I can have a little redwork quilt to enjoy.