Aww Sheet!

Since my last post the Flower Garden Shoo Fly top has been taken to the quilter. She expects to have it ready for me by the end of this week. I'll have the camera back then too so you'll get to see how I resolved the problem with the blocks that were not getting along together. In the meantime, I dedicated myself to using this holiday weekend to make some real progress on this set of friendship blocks:


I'm afraid to go back and see when I first posted this picture. Suffice to say that these blocks are all dated from 2002. They've not been on the sheet that long, but the sheet has been hanging in front of my studio closet doors for far too long! These are all friendship blocks that were made per my request. I asked my guild buddies to make a block of their choice (preferably a favorite pattern of theirs) but to restrict their color choices to black and white prints and hot pink. They were also supposed to keep the finished size of the blocks divisible by two. You know, 12" blocks or 10" blocks or 8 inches or 6 inches. I would even have accepted 4" blocks! As I have been working with these blocks I've discovered that I have a couple that would have finished at 7.5" or 9" (very few of them actually finish at the size they were intended to be - but I expected that). I knew there was a reason I kept putting off tackling this project ;- )

One of my friends made a simple double four-patch block. When I laid the blocks out on the sheet I decided to break that block into two units for the purpose of balancing out the two sides of the quilt top. You might be able to see that in the first picture. Eventually that led me to the decision to use checkerboards as the spacer units between the blocks. I really didn't want the blocks all mashed up side by side, but neither did I want more traditional sashing.

Shortly after I started working on this I knew I would have to move that sheet or those blocks somewhere, somehow. All that pinning and unpinning as I moved elements around was just too tedious to tolerate. My flannel design wall is not big enough to accommodate all of these blocks and I wasn't comfortable trying to work on this in blind sections as it were. I wasn't even sure the sheet would fit between the two doors at either end of what constitutes my design wall. As it turns out it does, but just barely. So I've hung the sheet over my design wall and now I can push the pins into the Styrofoam insulation board that's between the flannel and the wall itself, at least for the section I'm working on at the moment. Much better! I may even have this mostly together by the time the floral quilt comes home. (But don't hold your breath!)

And now I leave you with this little quilt in honor of those who gave their lives in the service of our country...

May their sacrifices never be forgotten.