Hey there, welcome back. I’ve been missing in action for a couple of weeks as we went camping and did a few other things. It was wonderful. The first time we have had the trailer out since returning from Arizona in the spring of 2020. So nice to be in a little space again. I really love little spaces and the cottage we live in is quite little as well as being off grid. But all that is a story for another blog post on another day.

Today is about making progress on the quilt challenge project with Ruth. Ruth has made great progress on her piece. Check it out: Ruth’s Quilt Challenge and see how she used EQ8 to figure out a layout and dimensions for her piece. I’m going to have to do a bit of work to catch up.

I started with the squiggles fabric and the three small blocks that go with it. I laid the blocks out on my table to see what I could come up with. I didn’t really like anything that I came up with. Here’s a couple of possible layoust.

3 small blocks flanking a large multi coloured fabric block — Layout option #1

3 small blocks and one large block in multi colours and black and white — Layout option #2

I auditioned fabrics to frame the coloured block and the grey scale block. It was a toss up between black or blue,

coloured block flanked by black strips — Auditioning black on coloured block

black fabric on either side of grey block — Auditioning black on the greyscale block

I went with the blue. I felt it looked better with the squiggle fabric. and that it highlighted the blue in the squiggle fabric. The strips are 1 inch finished and the block is 6.5 inches finished.

two blocks with blue sashing around each — Two blocks framed in blue

In the end I decided that I wasn’t enamoured with the stitched block and I also felt that the 12 inch squiggle block was too much as it is a very busy fabric so I decided to cut up the squiggle block and use it as a frame on the other two blocks. The stitched block got set aside for the moment – maybe for longer than a moment.

Initially I thought that I would make a piece with both squares in it and framed by 3 inch pieces of the squiggle fabric. Once together I thought it looked too heavy.

multicoloured fabric framing two blocks — Framed with squiggle fabric

So I ended up cutting them up so that the squiggle fabric is only 1.5 inches all the way around and there are 2 separate squares. The squares ended up being 9.5 inches. Very different from what Ruth did with her blocks.

multi coloured fabric frame around coloured block — Coloured block

multi coloured fabric framing grey scale block — Greyscale block

Now what to do with them. The next set of instructions say to quilt them using three different quilting techniques. Hmmm, I have 2 blocks and I really need 3…. maybe I should make another stitched block.

Until then,

Happy Quilting