Moda Building Blocks: done!

After a year of piecing the beautiful Moda building blocks quilt top is done!

It's so big I had to cut the corners off the picture to get it to fit on screen! 

I pieced this quilt as part of the Simply Solids block of the month project and slowly but surely it's been coming together. 

This was one of the better block of the month projects I was doing this year: it had a good variety of blocks (although no curves, foundation or paper piecing, inset seams etc.) and definitely forced me out of my comfort zone for piecing. Having initially cursed Moda's technique for cutting and piecing flying geese and half square triangles (bias anyone?!) it's now my favourite way to piece these units. No more flippy corners for me! 

For the backing I've chosen a very simple monochrome text. As front is so colourful and busy, I didn't want the back to fight with or detract from the front. I love that the names of some of the fabrics used in the top are listed on the back.

The added bonus with this project is the sheer volume of fabric I have left over. At the beginning of the project Simply Solids warned us to retain our scraps as we'd need them later on. So over the course of the year I've been retaining and re-using any scraps over 1". Which means at the end of the year I've ended up with this stash 

That's at least 15 fat quarters or half yards of white and numerous fat quarters of half yards of colours from across the Kona range. I've set aside the colours to make the Elizabeth Hartman Patchwork City quilt, perhaps supplementing from my print scraps. 

The white is going to be used for another project coming up. 

But as soon as one door closes, another opens. Starting this month is Don't Call Me Betsy's Epic Sampler Block of the Month project and I've got my fabric all ready to go! 

Pajamas days

I confess that, six days in to my epic week of sewing, I sort of ran out of steam this morning. I still had lots to do but my "get-up-and-go" sort of "got-up-and-went". Watching the election coverage until the wee hours of the morning didn't help either.

The rest of the morning was spent snuggled up in bed with a coffee and a book. 

I was saved from my sluggishness by the postman with this month's fabrics from Simply Solids and instructions about the next blocks in the Moda Building Blocks block of the month. 

Nice simple 6" blocks this month, although I have noticed that the design inside the pattern sleeve doesn't exactly match the block patterns or Moda's official construction diagram. For instance one block (44?) in the pattern and construction diagram is a blush pink and white bear paw. But in the sleeve design, it's a chevron. The yellow and white churn dash block was previously a much more complicated half square triangle block. 

Obviously Moda changed the design along the way but didn't get around to changing the design inside the sleeve. Either way, it's still a great design!

This month we also finished constructing sections A and C of the design and then sewed together A, B and C completing the top half of the quilt. 

Squee, we're getting closer to finishing! Don't the 6" blocks look tiny next to that mammoth star?!

Moving along, Building Blocks

A few days I had a brilliant idea - I would get ahead in the Simply Solids version of the Moda Building Blocks block of the month.

I have a large stash of Kona solids built up and, rather wait for more yardage to be sent out to me, I could simply start making the next blocks straight away. "Brilliant" I thought!

Until I hit a small snag - the next block, block 19, called for Caribbean.  Of which I had only tiny scraps left over. Not enough to make the be block. Oops.

Note to self: stop trying to be clever and stick to the plan!

With this month's new stash of Caribbean in hand, I got on with making blocks 19 and 20

Blocks 39, 41 and 42 quickly followed

And then I sewed together five larger blocks which we made in the first months to make section D of the quilt. Which I'll admit needs a good press!

Actually, apart from the Caribbean, I didn't cut into any of this month's fabrics and instead used scraps from my previous months. So most of this month's lovely cuts go into my Patchwork City bundle. Yay!

Scrappy Saturday?

Yesterday I wrote about the sheer volume of scraps I keep (basically everything!) and how completely unsorted they are (bad girl, bad!).

But there's one project I have ongoing where the scraps beat all others. They are numerous and large. The behemoth of scraps if you like - Moda's Building blocks BOM from Simply Solids.

At the beginning of this project I *think* we were told to save our scraps as we would be reusing FQs from one  month's block in future months. As a result I've been diligently saving every little scrap (well ok, bigger than 1") and using those scraps in future months.

As you can see they're all carefully labelled by colour, except for the whites which are just thrown all together.

It seems however that the Simply Solids team have been awesome and are actually sending us fresh cuts each month. Which means that my scraps pile for this project alone has grown and grown.

Yes, those are FQs of Kona Snow, 14 in all.

Once this project is completed I'm going to decide what to do with my scraps. I could throw them into my general stash but I feel that there's so many, I could tackle another project. Maybe Elizabeth Hartman's Patchwork City?

Two quilts out of one stash? Score.

(Sort of) finish it up Friday

Ok, so I have actually haven't finished this quilt but I've finished the blocks for this month - that counts right?!

Come to think of it, this week has all been about finishing up tasks for the month. Today is the turn of the Moda Building Blocks BOM project by Simply Solids.

This month we finished the last of the 12" blocks and also joined section B of the quilt together.

In all honesty we could have joined at least one of the other sections together too as we have finished all the blocks but no doubt this is a task for another month.

I loved the 12" blocks; they're so much easier to deal with than the behemoth 36" ones or the 28" ones. I'm not looking forward to those tiny 6" ones - those flying geese are going to be nightmarish!

Back to basics

Today I finished off the Quilt As You Go sashing between the rows of the Leah Day Building Blocks quiltalong. All I need to do now is trim up the edges and bind it. It's so great to have to miss out the horrible basting bit!

The blocks in this quilt are a lot simpler than I normally tackle and I must confess that I didn't originally start this quilt because of the piecing. Instead I wanted to use it to practise my free motion quilting. And whilst I did get a lot of great quilting practise (my circles are now great so long as I can mark the quilt top!), the piecing was a good reminder about fundamental blocks and techniques. With huge four patches in high contrast fabrics, there's no room to hide if your points don't perfectly match up. It's a good reminder to me that, amidst all the fancy needle point applique and bias bars, it don't mean a thing if your 1/4" seam is off.

On a separate note, how cool is this back?! I need to add a monochrome quilt to my bucket list. You can't get more basic than b&w.

The impossibility of random

Most of today was spent joining the rows of Leah Day's Building Blocks Quiltalong. The project is a "quilt as you go" project so, having pieced and quilted 42 individual blocks I now had the task of joining the blocks together in rows and (tomorrow) the rows into a quilt.

Although Leah's pattern just called for two fabrics to be used for the whole quilt, I decided to use a variety of bright solids, one per style of block. Ironically Leah later produced a Spoonflower cheater cloth which was almost identical to my finished quilt - great minds think alike! 

Here's my quilt ready to be finished off with the sashing between the rows.

Despite changing my fabrics, I still closely followed Leah's pattern so, when it called for the blocks to be sewn together in a particular order, I still followed along. Because I had used different colours to Leah, that meant the some of the neighbouring blocks had high contrast, some low. 

I'm normally a very "matchy-matchy" quilter; my nightmare is a pattern that says "randomly sew one piece A to one piece B". But what if the fabrics match?! Or clash?! Or there isn't enough contrast?! I don't think I'm ever going to manage to sew a scrappy project because my quilts and fabrics have to be planned out to the n-th degree. This was a real problem in the Mister DJ quilt where I was meant to randomly sew strips together. I confess I didn't but it still came out great. 

Happily it's not just me that had a problem with choosing things at random. Apparently humans are pre-programmed to find patterns and create order and can't therefore make truly random choices. Even when we think we are making random choices, we're actually still broadly following a pattern.

The fact that Leah's quilt now has two neighbouring pink blocks and a few clashing colour combinations is actually great - for once I've actually been random! Although technically I suppose I'm still following Leah's pattern so I'm not really being random after all. Drat.

Moda Building Blocks pattern by Simply Solids

Along with lots of other quilters I'm currently piecing together the Moda Building Blocks pattern. One of my favourite shops, Simply Solids are running the pattern as a block of the month club using Kona by Robert Kaufman solids. They've cleverly matched all the tones and hues of the original pattern to produce an almost identical finished quilt.

So far we've pieced the HUGE 36" blocks, a 30", 24" and 18" blocks and we're now working our way through the 12" blocks. Still to come are some 6" blocks with tiny pieces. Yay!

Here's some pics of the larger blocks...

And some of the smaller ones...

Apart from one flying goose unit where I lost point and will probably redo, I'm fairly happy with them so far even though some of the techniques were not my usual style. For instance - I'm a "stitch and flip" flying goose girl. I know it wastes some fabric but I liked not having to sew those bias seams. Ditto for half square triangles where I like to create them two at a time by sewing down the middle of squares and then cutting them apart.

There's none of that in his pattern where all the triangles are cut on the bias and then carefully pieced together. I've talked before about why I love BOM projects and this is a good example of why. I would have stuck to my tried and tested methods if this project hadn't forced me to try something different. And now I have a new skill to show for all my hard (yeah right!) work.

Let's see whether I'm so sanguine after sewing those 3/4" seams in the 6" blocks!