I'm new to blogging so please bear with me as I get the hang of this!! I decided to start this blog in order to chronicle my progress as I work though the Quilters Academy books after reading the blog published by Block Head who did the same thing beginning in 2009.
I bought the books last November, read through them & didn't try any of the lessons. Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago - I've been trying to piece some quilt blocks as therapy while recovering from shoulder surgery but could not for the life of me get any of them to come out right. The points were chopped off, blocks were too small, not square, etc. and I want to get good at this!! Reading about Block Head's journey has galvanized me into action ~ so lets get this party started!
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| Sampler from book |
The book starts out with teaching proper techniques for cutting accurately, sewing a 1/4 inch seam and pressing. The first exercise is a section of the sampler above, the center section of fence post blocks.
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| My fence post section |
The idea is to work through the exercises & quilts in order to practice the techniques taught and you will continually improve on your abilities as you go. This exercise took me a very long time to complete because I had to sew a strip set, press, measure and then unpress, unsew and try again several times before I finally got to the elusive 1/4 inch on my machine and kept the seam straight all the way down the strip set. I'm not complaining because this is exactly what I need to do in order to improve so it's all good. I worked on it for 3 afternoons to get it where you see it now. There will be several more exercises related to this sampler sprinkled throughout this book & volume 2 before it's completed.
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| Harriet's Woodland Winter |
This is the next project in the book, it's a small baby or wall size quilt and since I have no babies in my life I'm going for the wall quilt option. It is supposed to be 33" x 33" without borders so maybe it will be big enough for a lap quilt. Since no borders are added to anything until the end of volume 1 I'll just have to wait and see. On to fabric selection - I LOVE this part!!
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| My fabric selections for Woodland Winter project |
The fabrics I selected for this project are all from my stash and are shown above (please excuse the not-so-great photography, my sewing room is a room with zero windows & no matter where I put items they always have some sort of shadow on them. Also, the white fabric at the top is a white on white print, it doesn't show up very well in person and not at all in the picture). I think this will make a nice wall quilt to display in the summertime around Independence Day - what do you think?
Until next time...
