Friday, February 14, 2014

Farmer's Wife Friday 7

I was really dreading Squash Blossom. I was looking at printing the templates, but I really hate how the templates are one per page. I know that someone has compressed all of the templates into about 15 pages, but the only place I can find them I have to pay $9.00 for access. I'm not using the templates enough to justify paying for them. I've also heard that Marti Michell has a set of the acrylic templates, but again I don't want to pay for them. I decided to google the quilt block and found a great tutorial. The block in the tutorial is for an 18" block, but seeing how she did it allowed me to figure out how to scale it down to the 6" block I needed. I'm not sure I'd want to add all of these extra seams if I was using a print, but since I'm using solids it didn't bother me.

#86 Squash Blossom

I also figured out a fun way to make the churn dash block. I cut (4) 3" squares of black and white. I drew diagonal lines across 2 of the squares for my HSTs. The other 2 squares I drew a line down the middle and sewed 1/4" away on both sides of all of the lines. I cut on the lines and trimmed everything to 2.5". If I was making a lot of Churn Dash blocks with the same fabric like I did for my mystery quilt I would strip piece them, but if I'm doing a scrappy churn dash, or a single block I like this method. It's a lot easier than keeping track of all of those tiny pieces. (If you want I can do a full tutorial on this method and show pictures of each step.)

#20 Churn Dash

16/111
20:00

6 comments:

  1. I am liking the gray and black.

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    1. Thanks. I'm loving the black, white and grey color scheme too.

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  2. Thanks for the churn dash tips, that's a great way to do the block that hadn't occurred to me nor have I seen it anywhere else. Good for you !~!.

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    1. I've never seen a churn dash made this way either. I really think I'll have to work on a bigger project with lots of churn dashes made this way.

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  3. Farmer's Wife is definitely a lot of work! I "did" mine with Quiltboard.com group. "We" did 2 blocks per week too. For me that was a breakneck pace. I didn't do any other quilting but those 2 blocks. Note, I have very little quilting time; mostly I only quilt on Saturdays. It was fun. I haven't finished mine yet, but it is my second UFO for this year. Have you tried paper piecing the blocks? I started out with templates but quickly turned to paper piecing when the blocks had those itsy bitsy HSTs! There's a Yahoo group that had all the paper piecing patterns for FW. It made my life much easier. I can share the patterns with you, just email me! BTW, I love your idea of blacks, greys and whites--very cool.

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    1. Thanks so much for your comment. There's a Flickr group that I'm working on my blocks with. I have heard about the paper piecing patterns on the Yahoo group, but I really hate paper piecing. It's really crazy, but I'm having a lot of fun with those tiny HSTs.

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