Hey Everyone, welcome back to Stash Blasting Wednesday.

This past weekend I joined 59 other women along with Cynthia & Shannon, the owners of Country Concessions at a retreat. The retreat was sponsored by Country Concessions and held at the Nottawasaga Inn just outside of Alliston, Ontario. The room was huge and set up with 62 – 8 foot long tables for each of us to sew at – so much space to sew in. There was constant sounds of the machines whirring and ladies chattering. A great weekend was had by all.

I decided to use up a layer cake while I was there and work on one of my new patterns. What is a layer cake? A layer cake is a bundle of 40 – 10 inch squares from Moda. They are all pre-cut and ready to go. I of course did not use them as the 10 inch square but rather cut them up into smaller pieces. The packaging that comes with them actually gives cutting instructions on how to cut for creating pieced quilts with them. I made my own cuts up.

The package I used was called 10 Little Things from Moda and my feature blocks for this were the owls. Unfortunately, there were only 4 owl blocks in the bundle so I was a bit limited.

The owl blocks

With these owl blocks and a few others I made two long strips to be the outer pieces of the quilt.

The outside strips

For the middle sections I created some more strips with the bubble or rock blocks and snowflake blocks.

The other fabrics

More strips created for the middle

With these all done I added in some pieced rows which in the end I just didn’t like and so ditched them fairly quickly.  By this time my brain was tired and I decided to quit for the day. Needless to say the design that I was testing didn’t get tested with these fabrics.

As I went to bed Saturday evening I had an idea and had figured out how to move on with the quilt.

I found that the strips were too wide so I cut them all in half. Once they were cut in half I could see it coming together much better.

All the strips cut in half

I created strips and added in some sashing between each row. The sashing was yardage I had to match. The outer rows I had added in sashing from the beginning to break up the larger pieces and create some contrast. The red I found to be too much in the middle and broke it up as well with the blue bubbles. By adding red, blue and grey throughout the middle of most of the rows it created a focal point for the quilt.

Dark blue sashing added

The rest of the quilt has some symmetry to it. I am still debating of adding in some orange as I am finding the red a bit overpowering. There are two orange 10 inch squares left which I think need to be used. This of course means reverse sewing but I think it will be worth it in the end.

Quilt top completed without the orange added

Creating with a layer cake can be fun but I do find it limiting due to the size and only so many of each colour.

And I still have some squares leftover for another quilt.

Happy Quilting!