Saturday, May 25, 2013

Cotton Boll and Lincoln's Platform

Made a little more progress on blocks.

Cotton Boll is a fun one.  Fussy cutting the bars to make them meet in the middle is just plain cool.  I love how that works!
















This is Lincoln's Platform.  Not too sure about the vibrancy of the pink and the blue in it.  I like the fabrics, but they seem a bit bright.  I guess we'll see as we evaluate them all together on the design wall.






























The fabric samples you see clipped to the pattern pages are the beginnings of my recording system to catalog the fabrics we end up using in these quilts.  I was reading on Barbara Brackman's Material Culture blog once about how the fabric companies kept "Mill Books" to document their fabrics.  I thought that sounded like a good idea.  A little fabric history for posterity.

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Good progress today!

Well, we went to town today. Rather, Annie went to town.  She got a lot of blocks finished and I got quite a few cut out.  My machine control pedal broke part way through, so I got very little sewing done.

Here's the scoop on Annie's blocks......Good day!


















Log Cabin

Comfort Quilt Block

Birds in the Air

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Work Day

We had our first day of actual working on cutting and sewing together after doing a lot of joint planning and then sewing on our own.  We made some good progress and had a great time.

Here's Annie working on the "Little Blue Basket" block.



And here is the progression of the "Texas Tears" block that I worked on.
 













Sunday, May 5, 2013

First Blocks......

Our plan for making these quilts entails each of us making two each of half the blocks.  There are 60-some total between the blog patterns and the book.  So, we went through and numbered them according to the blog posts, then added the additional 10 from the book.  Annie has the odd-numbered blocks, and I'm doing the even-numbered ones.

So, our first work day consisted of us figuring out the fabric choices for several of our blocks.  I love the process!  With such lovely fabrics to work with, we're feeling pretty confident that the end result will be something we'll love.

This is the first block pattern I finished.  It's "North Star."


And this is the first block pattern Annie finished.  It's "Missouri Star."  At this point, it's our favorite.



Funny how we both did a star first!

So, we're off and running.


Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Where this all started........

We love history.  We love fabric.  We love quilting. We love that they all go together!

When we see quilts from the Civil War era, we are amazed and awed.

When we see Civil War reproduction fabrics, we smile.  And we buy them.
Too often...... :-)

So, more than a decade ago, Annie's quilt group, with which I was not yet familiar, embarked on a group project making a Broken Dishes pattern using Civil War reproduction fabrics.  Some of the blocks were orphaned and ended up in a bag in her stash.  Last summer she gave them to me and I turned them into this:



There are 6 original blocks, then several that were taken apart and put back together in different color combinations, and then there are many that were made new from fabrics from both Annie's stash and mine.

From there we began sharing books and blogs and Wednesday afternoons, and came upon Barbara Brackman's Civil War Sampler.  At first, I wasn't too impressed with the blocks in the book because the colorways were not often to my taste, but Annie saw beyond the block pictures to Becky Brown's finished quilt that is pictured in the book.  Beautiful!


She suggested making it as a group project with our quilt group.  The idea lasted about a week, at which point we realized it would be akin to tearing our hair out to organize such a feat.  So, she suggested we just do it ourselves.  Well, then.

So, we decided to focus on Barbara's Metropolitan Fair fabric line, purchased a fat-quarter bundle of the whole collection (something neither of us had EVER done!  Woo Hoo!!), and we were in motion.  I put together pattern sets for each of us and we put them in binders, bought a couple of pretty boxes for our fabric stashes specifically for this quilt, and started in.

What a fun ride it is turning out to be!