If you are looking for a quilt-along where you can see what the finished product will look like, and traditional foundation piecing is your preference but you like modern quilts…if you are looking for one that uses up a lot of scraps and moves at an easy pace so you’ll have plenty of time to work on it with a group, then I’m going to throw this out here – consider this quilt by Amy Ellis.

She has a facebook page that you can join and see how others are making this quilt.  It literally just started a few days ago so there is plenty of time to jump in.  This one I think finishes out to 60″ x 72″ but as you can see, it would be easy enough to make it larger if you wanted to.

If I understand how this will work, each month we’ll work on a different set of blocks that are all the same.  For instance, there are large crosses and small crosses – those are different sets.  For November, we’re working on the large crosses.  Yes, there are 13 of them but they were super easy to make.  I don’t know what we’ll work on next month, but an example might be the small cross blocks.

I literally cut these and sewed all 13 of them today.  In fact, I had 4 of them done by the time the sun came up this morning thanks to the time change.  I had bought fabric that caught my eye for this project a few weeks ago.  Initially, I was thinking I wanted a consistent white fabric for the entire quilt but I’ve decided I’m going to vary that with subtle white patterned fabrics.

I do have a few stories to share from the quilt show.  I feel like I should call it the full name – Houston International Quilt Festival since it’s the quilt show of quilt shows.

The first is if you like blue, start cutting!  The 2019 quilt festival will be the 45th anniversary and they will be accepting quilts 50″ x 50″ and larger for the sapphire display.  There were so many quilts where I kept saying “wow! wow! wow!”.  But the cool part is I saw some others also where my initial thought was “I could’ve made that”.  My friend who gave us the tickets has told me more than once that there are lots of quilts by regular ol’ quilters like me who just enjoy it as a hobby and that is true.  There is so much ingenuity but there were also quilts by people who just honestly had the self-confidence to enter a quilt in the place.

One of our foursome missed our group lunch because she was busy getting her picture taken with Jenny Doan from Missouri Star Quilt Co.  We kept missing Jenny, so I have no picture to show for that. After lunch was over, I was walking around with a friend and suddenly right in front of us was the one and only Rob Appell from Man Sewing.

I told him I was shamelessly hitting him up for a selfie and he was kind enough to oblige! He actually was shopping for himself at the time.  He was so genuine and his enthusiasm for quilting just comes out in every sentence!