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.

Blocks of the month (Or "Block of the months"?)

Yesterday I trimmed up my individual blocks for the Leah Day Building Blocks Quiltalong. I had become seriously behind schedule and so ended up quilting all my blocks in the two weeks over Christmas and New Years. By the beginning of January I was done but was thoroughly sick of that quilt! So I put it to one side and worked on other projects until yesterday.

Don't the blocks look better all nearly trimmed?! 

Although my bin did end up looking like an A level textile student's final project...

Leah made her quilt two tone using blue and grey solids. I decided to use white as one solid and then switch between solid colours for each different block. The blocks are backed in a mixture of black and white geometric prints to give some contrast.

Now all I have to do is bind the blocks into a quilt. But that's for another day.

I like block of the month projects because I am, at heart, a lazy quilter. I practice one technique until I'm fairly good at it and then stick to the tried and tested. Block of the month projects force me out of my comfort zone and make me try new techniques and styles. I'm far too conformist (and cheap!) to sign up for a project and then miss bits out. Those circles in Leah's project were fairly rough to start with but by the end they turned out fairly well!

I try to sign up for at least one BOM a year, usually the Craftsy one at least because it's free. This year I'm also doing the Moda Building Blocks run by Simply Solids, the Snapshots and Gravity projects, both by Fat Quarter Shop. So far I've kept up but it's only February.

What is the plural of "block of the month" anyway?