I belong to a quilt guild, the Lafayette County Sew 'n Sews. We meet the second Monday of every month. Every two years, we have a quilt show in September. Last time, I was one of 6 ladies on the quilt committee to make, promote, and raffle off a quilt as a fund raiser for our guild. Time flies when you're having fun, and September is sneaking up on us. We've been talking since January in the Guild about getting a committee together to get started on this year's quilt, but talk is all that's taken place. Now it's getting closer, and time is more important. A few of us started the committee ourselves. We made a Facebook Committee page, posted our meetings, and invited the committee members from last time.
We decided on some kind of a log cabin quilt. We chose this picture as a model for our quilt. It's a version of the Broken Star quilt pattern. We only had this picture to go on, no pattern. I have EQ7, so it became my job (somehow) to make up the pattern. We had some fabric already that we wanted to use, fall colors, beautiful golds and creams and rusts. Most of it with metallic gold flecks or specks.
The first thing I did was make a grid after studying the the picture, and discovered that there were 4 types of blocks, which I labeled A, B, C, and D. "A" blocks were dark/dark, "B" blocks were light/light, "C" blocks were medium/light, and "D" blocks were dark/light. From this, I made a block in EQ7, and after much experimentation, colored it with the appropriate colors:
The 4 center A blocks are slightly different form the rest, so that our beautiful black and gold paisley could take center stage. This paisley will also be the borders all around, so we needed the black to separate that in the corners, so the paisley in the blocks wouldn't fade into the paisley in the borders.
Next, I made a pattern for each block. We then decided which fabrics would go where. This step was actually done at a committee meeting at the local quilt store where we could pull other fabrics that looked good together and would complement our other chosen fabrics.
I then made 5 sample blocks, one of each kind.
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| 4 "Center A" blocks form a star. |
One of the last things we did was calculate how much of each kind of fabric we needed, and cut our strips and pieces. Whew! What a process! Sixty-four zip log bags now hold the directions and pieces for our blocks. We will pass these out to the quilt guild ladies next week at our April meeting, so that everyone who wants to can help with this project.
We made our outer strips of each block an inch wider than necessary so that we will have a built-in "fudge factor" when trimming the blocks to 12.5 inches. We have learned from experience that 12.5" can mean anything from 11.5 to 13" or more! Not everyone sews with the same accurate quarter inch seam! After trimming the blocks, the committee will meet again and sew the finished blocks into rows, and rows into the top. Hopefully, all will be finished by June so we can promote the quilt and sell raffle tickets in advance. We don't even know what it will look like yet. This is a TRUE MYSTERY QUILT!!!! I hope it turns out ok. It's a lot of wasted effort if it turns out to be an ugly quilt and no one wants to buy a ticket for it!
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