Swooning (Slowly) Along

You may or may not recall my post awhile ago about the practice Swoon block I made, but I have since cut up all of my Meadowsweet fabrics by Sandie Henderson and have pieced together two of the four blocks I plan to  make. I know 4 blocks doesn't sound like a lot, but each block in this quilt pattern is a whopping 24" square!

I'm not super happy with the first one. There isn't quite enough contrast between the two fabrics to make the pattern really stand out. I like how the second one turned out much better.

It was a bit on the windy side here today, so getting this picture was more difficult than you might imagine.

If you really want to be inspired to take the plunge and start one of these beautiful quilts, check out this Flickr group for some serious eye candy!

WIP Wednesday

I totally spaced posting last week! I think getting used to always posting something on one certain day might take awhile for me to get used to.

I haven't started any new projects (well, maybe just one) but I have gotten much closer to finishing my WIP's I showed you 2 weeks ago! I'm actually pretty proud of myself for getting so much done. I'm not usually quite so productive.

I finished quilting the camping quilt. It just needs binding and then she'll be ready to hit the road with me! I can picture myself curled up in it around a campfire sipping a cocktail :)

And remember the pile of Plume fabrics from my last post? That pile is now this:

Also, I made a wall hanging with the Bliss hexies I was working on. It needs to be quilted and bound, but it's getting there. Originally I was going to arrange the small hexagons into a big hexagon and that was going to be my wall hanging. But when I put it on the background fabric the shape reminded me of a tree. I just happened to have some fabric left from the camping quilt that looked like bark. So I cut a tree trunk shape out of that and now I have a hexie tree!

I didn't make my blocks last week for the Farmer's Wife QAL, so today I made two. They are my favorite so far. These are numbers 11 (Broken Dishes) and 12 (Broken Sugar Bowl).

The one new project I started was a jelly roll race quilt. I've had this jelly roll for ages. The line is called Shangri-la by 3 Sisters. I had no idea what I was going to do with it until I saw THIS blog post from my friend Amanda. I loved it, and knew instantly that I wanted to make one. The top took all of about 2 hours to complete and I'm really happy with the result.

Now it goes into the WIP pile because I have to purchase a backing fabric and it needs to be quilted! Also, I might put some borders on it to make it a little bigger.

I hope everyone is enjoying their Wednesday. As always, if you head on over to the Freshly Pieced blog HERE, you can see all the other blogs that are linked up this week. I just popped in and there are a bunch! Go check it out!

Selina

I Am a Farmer's Wife

There was some talk about doing a quilt along based on the book The Farmer's Wife by Laurie Aaron Hird. It started with Amanda and Angela over on Twitter and it grew, exponentially, from there. As of right now there are 368 members signed up on the flickr group.

I had seen the Farmer's Wife book before and I knew immediately that this was a project I could get on board with. It was only 2 blocks per week, so not too overwhelming. AND it would challenge me to try techniques and make blocks I would never have tried on my own. I was the 5th person to sign up in the flickr group, and I ordered my book right away. Unfortunately, I was so excited about the great price I found for the book that I ordered it before I realized it was coming from the UK and it would take 2 weeks to get to me!

The book finally arrived two days ago and I was anxious to get started on my blocks.

My printer is on the fritz at the moment so I loaded up the kiddos and took my book down to Kinko's to print out the templates so I could get started. To be honest, I was rather unhappy with this part of my experience. I knew there would be quite a few templates. I mean, I am making 111 blocks, but when the guy told me it printed 130 pages, I was like "WHAAAAAAAT?!?!?!" Seriously. Every single template (even the 1.5 inch square) is printed on it's very own piece of paper *. Many of the templates are not even necessary. I mean, do I really need a template to cut a 3" x 1.5" rectangle? Not really. No measurements are given in the book however, which makes every template required unless you are good at quilter math - and I am not. I kept thinking there is no possible way that the author of this book was an actual farmer's wife, for they would never be so wasteful. I thought for sure that I was so turned of by this lack of concern for the welfare of trees that I would be angry the entire year it would take me to make this quilt. Until I made my first block...

The fabric I chose for my blocks is Hope Valley by Denyse Schmidt. I decided to suck up my frustration and start cutting. I had 3 weeks of catching up to do so I had 6 blocks to make.

After I had my first block sewn together, I was over the bad feelings I had regarding this book. It was so pretty that I just couldn't be mad anymore. It took me 2 days to complete my first 6 blocks, and I couldn't be happier with how they're turning out.

 Block 1

 Block 2

 Block 3

 Block 4

 Block 5

 Block 6

I decided to make the king-sized version of the quilt, which will bump me up to 145 blocks. I plan to use it for my own bed and think I may even splurge a bit to have it professionally quilted by a longarm quilter.

* I did find out later that there are places online that you can print out the templates using FAR less paper. It doesn't do me any good now, but hopefully others will know about this and save some money, and trees.

Selina