Quilt projects on my sewing table in June (Quilt studio diary)

Welcome to my quilt studio! Today, I’ll share two quilting projects that I’ve recently been working on in my sewing space.

Project 1: X blocks into a quilt top

First, here are almost all the X blocks that I needed for my latest quilt project. See the clips that hold them together?

I got a box full of number and letter clips from my friend Soile for my birthday, to use for tagging blocks. There is one of each number from zero to ten, and then alphabets. That’s why I had to be a little creative when using the clips to mark how many blocks there were in each stack. L3 is obviously 13. That was easy enough, but when I’d made all the blocks I needed, I really had to stretch my creativity!

Z0 = ten; LT = eleven; I4 = 14, and the upside down J together with 5 make fifteen.

I got the idea for these blocks when sewing different X blocks for the “Swiftly Flew the Long-eared Herald” quilt. It took me a couple of tries to get the measurements right (I can see this from the photos I took of the early blocks). After that, all was quick work, and in less than a month, I had sewn 75 blocks, as you can see from my studio diary post from April!

When I was certain I had all the blocks that I needed, I put them into value order according to their background fabric colour:

When I first started, I planned to use only seven different backgrounds:

I even had a plan for how many of each to make and what kind of layout they would make:

However, when I completed my yardage calculations, it was clear I would have to introduce a few more background colours because I was working from my stash, not buying more fabric.

With more background fabrics, I resorted to the easiest way to achieve a layout: starting from the darker bottom rows and progressing upwards towards the lighter-coloured blocks. I first laid the blocks out into straight rows. At this point, I saw that the yellow-green batik background looked lighter than the light turquoise:

It turned out that I had to change the order of yellow-green, light turquoise and pale purple blocks, but after that, all colours seemed to be in their places. Then, I tweaked the design by staggering the blocks:

And here’s my final quilt top, all sewn together:

Did the top match my original vision? Not completely. I had planned to create the X pieces from scrappy strips that I would sew for the purpose, but I only made four or five before I noticed that it was just too fiddly work.

In this photo, you can see a bit of our meadow-lawn. To be friendlier to pollinators, we let our grass grow into meadow length in the early summer. My husband only mows paths into the long grass so that we don’t have to wade in it to reach the garden swing or the compost heap.

Notice how I had to cut blocks in half at the bottom and top edges! I hate to cut off a part of a perfectly fine block, but it could not be avoided. I thought of designing half-X-blocks so that I would not have to cut off anything, but it seemed like too much work.

I’m sure I’ll figure out a good use for the off-cuts eventually. Perhaps I’ll sew two together to make a franken-X-block, or use them as they are on the outside or inside of a zipper bag.

The top is ready then, and as soon as my friend Soile is back at her longarm machine, I’ll take it to be quilted. I haven’t decided on the quilting pattern yet, so your suggestions will interest me greatly! Leave a comment if you have a vision on a quilting pattern that would bring out the best in this top!

I’ve made notes of making these blocks so that I could write a pattern for this quilt. Do you think people would be interested in this pattern?

Project 2: Simple but always fun 9-patch blocks

It always feels a little empty when a quilt project is finished, but this time, I didn’t feel that way for long. I started cutting 2-inch squares out of my smaller scraps, to make scrappy 9-patches. My vision is to sew them together somewhat at random – only creating pools of colour that flow across the quilt surface.

In other words, the layout is not going to look anything like this:

There, I just took my first blocks and laid them out on the floor at random. After all, it’s hard to create pools of colour when one only has ten blocks ready.

Finishing notes

It makes me glad that you have found my colour and other tips. Orange in quilts and turquoise in quilts were the first splendid colour tips topics, and they have attracted the most views. Of my other tips, the common quilting mistakes worth fixing have been popular, too.

I’d really like to hear what you are working on right now, or which quilting challenges you may be dealing with. Is it choosing colours? Finding use for scraps? Deciding on your next project?

Leave me a comment and let me know. Your questions give me ideas and may turn into helpful posts!