The Splendid Sampler is winding down with just 14 blocks to go. Bonnie Hunter’s mystery quilt is fast and furious, running only through sometime in January typically. I’m finishing up the last 2 blocks for Leah Day’s quilt-as-you-go. I learn a lot from these large groups so when Amy Ellis started a group to make a sampler quilt from her latest book, I jumped on board.
Last month we made the larger of 2 cross blocks. This month are large Greek cross blocks.I spent a lot more time picking out fabrics than I did making these which was really nice this time of year.
I had originally planned to use only Kaffe Fassett fabrics that I have for this but my stash for this is all 10″ squares so that didn’t work for these blocks. I had these on hand already along with a few others so I went back to Amy’s layout and decided the bolder of the 2 fabrics needed to be in the cross and not in the corners. As an added bonus, I had AccuQuilt dies for this so the cutting went really fast!
I also got the “runway lights” added to my Avante today. There are 2 USB ports on it – who knew! It plugs in which hopefully means the lights last a while.
The machine quilting project is a lot smaller quilt than I realized when I signed up for it. It’s quilt-as-you-go so I still need to connect the blocks together. I am leaning toward adding at least a 5″ border around it just to make it larger and I may add 2 or 3 borders and then quilt the rest of it once I have all the blocks connected.
Since this literally is just a practice quilt and not a gift for anyone, I decided to use the last couple of blocks for longarm quilt practice with the rulers. I completely skipped past her quilt design (sorry Leah!) and tried out circles, curves, waves and straight lines. I’m about 75% done with this block. It’s nice to have no guilt about mistakes since I gave my permission to get them all out of the way on this quilt!
Nice Greek blocks.
Thank you!
I really like the quilting we can see on the last block. Everything looks great and you’re speeding through so many quilts!
I’ve officially begun my vacation so hopefully I’ll get lots of sewing done now!
Great attitude about forgiving your mistakes. That is ho you learn. You are doing so well at the quilting it makes me want to jump into it also. No place to put a machine!
I definitely understand that; I have 3 quilting friends with the same dilemma. I did see a vast improvement when I went from trying to quilt on a sewing machine to the sit-down Sweet Sixteen which fortunately doesn’t take up a lot of space but still….space is space.
I really like these bright Greek blocks! Time picking out fabric is time well spent!
I’ve been tempted to sew ahead on this one because I like it so much but I have enough irons in the fire to keep me busy.
Your posts just keep confirming that either you never sleep or you are really a quilting interstellar entity sent her to make the rest of us look lazy 😉
Haha! I’ve been missing my early morning walks this week due to inclement weather so that’s helped my sewing time!
Happy practicing!
It’s good to have something to practice on with your Texas Longarm. 😉