Friendship Quilt Update

Just a quick update for those of you who will check the blog one more time before heading out to our meeting at Grace's house on Monday. 

I made up one of the blocks to show you how it will look.

 I decided to go with a lighter background fabric than the tan shown in the magazine. 
I did so for a couple of reasons.  One was that when I looked at the tan fabric, I was afraid that our signatures would not show up. 

The second reason was that none of the tans I saw had enough fabric to make sure we all had enough for our 12 blocks. That made it a pretty easy decision.  I actually am allowing 1/2 yard each, so that if you want to add more blocks to your quilt, you will have plenty of background fabric to match. 

Anyway, here is the block made up:

I know that I told you that leaves come in all colors, and I am not normally drawn to brown, but let's just say this brown fabric "spoke to me."   So, my leaves are brown.  I am counting on all of you to come up with bright colorful leaves to offset my dark, dead-looking brown leaf.  That is your challenge ;-) At any rate, I did make the strips surrounding the leaf bright!

Having had the experience of making the first leaf, I can assure you I have already made all the mistakes ~ including sewing the leaf together wrong.  I would like to say that I did that on purpose, just so I could tell you how easy it is to fix, but that is not the case.  I was sitting there with the picture in front of me holding the pieces of the leaf just so, and I turned around to my machine, and something strange happened.  When I opened up those two strips of fabric, It did not look like a leaf at all.  I had sewn the wrong side of the strips together. So I have had the experience of ripping the first block apart.  No one else has to do that to make us all feel better!

Anyway, I do have a few suggestions.

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  Make a sample block first to place in front of you with the pictures from the pattern which I will give you on Monday.  After you do that, you can chain piece the parts and put them together pretty quickly.
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  If you have one of these padded small ironing board/cutting mats, or a small mat:

bring it.  It will be good for laying out the pieces of the block next to your sewing machine before you sew them together.

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  Next, if you have one of these:

bring it.  That would be a Chinese food chopstick, a skewer, or a bodkin.  It would be most helpful for holding the tiny pieces of the leaf together as you feed them into the machine.

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  Last, but not least, you might want to bring one of these:

That would be a seam ripper....not that anyone else will need it now that I have given you fair warning.  Just in case, I will have mine handy as a preventative measure so that those leaves fall right into place.

I really like the block, and, mistakes notwithstanding, it really does go together easily and quickly.  I cannot wait to see what fabrics you have chosen and see how all of it looks together. 

See you Monday,

Susan