February Doodles

Our chosen block for the short month of February has an improbable name – French Silk Pie. Here’s the block as it appears in the EQ Block Library –

But, of course, it’s so easy to change things in EQ – here we just replaced the red with blue.

And then further blue tweaks and placement –

Time to try out some simple quilt settings before we end up with too many block choices!

Having added a smidge of red in the quilt setting above we decided to take the red one step further –

Turn on point without sashing –

Fill in those blank corners and borders but keep it simple –

And, finally, an arrangement of January and February’s blocks –

Download a block to colour, a quilt to colour and EQs rotary cutting instructions for the block – enjoy making your own French Silk Pie!

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Doodling in April

Spring has sprung – and our Doodles for April are over on their own page as usual. This month we’ve chosen Fools Square. Intentions were really good to have maybe even made the block in actual fabric, but intentions are not always reliable! So, no fabric block to show you here but, instead, some virtual colour and fabric variations from EQ8.

And in the hope that the inner workings of WordPress are indeed working, you can download a colouring sheet for a Fools Square quilt here.

And if you fancy making your own 10 inch block, or even the quilt you have just designed from the colouring sheet then you can find links to rotary cutting charts, templates (if you prefer) and general piecing guidelines on our sister site Meadowside Designs.

Scrappy Sunday

It’s not a finish but it’s a top!  The scrappy Friendship Star/Nine Patch blocks Barbara made are sashed and bordered and moved to the “await quilting” pile.  This was a really quick make and a great side adventure using some of those 2 1/2inch squares that were cut at the beginning of March.

 

It looks like we are going to turn our attention away from squares for a while.  We’ve had a few high-level virtual consultations over the last week (HQ of course is closed at the moment so everything has been screen to screen and bring your own caffeine..) and we think it might be time to feature traditional blocks which work well with scraps.  One of our go-to references for scrappy and traditional is “Great Scrap Bag Quilts” by Jan Halgrimson – here’s the sideways version

We’ve mentioned Jan’s books in earlier scrappy posts – our copies are VERY well thumbed and have been a source of much inspiration over the years.  Here’s a peep at one page (P.85) which caught our eye – the block is Scrap Bag Star.

This is a 12inch block and we are trying not to focus too much on that instruction that says “cut 24 light, 84 dark” – that’s a LOT of pieces for a 12inch block!  But it would make a reasonable dent in a stack of very small scraps ….  The lovely thing about the early books of patchwork patterns is that they are black & white only and you can use your imagination to put colour in them.  And the equally lovely thing is that we now have EQ8 (and its predecessors) to draw, colour and make virtual quilts with these blocks.  Here’s our first EQ8 stab at Scrap Bag Star –

Then it’s hard to resist clicking on the random recolour tool –

We’re off to get more scrappy inspiration from Ms Halgrimson – tune in next week for June’s EQ Doodles, Free Pattern Friday and more scrappiness on Sunday.

Happy stitching!