Tadaaaaah!!!

As we Feathergirls promised in our previous blogposts, today we will show the blocks each of us has chosen for our Featherweight quilt. As I am writing this post, I still do not know the choice of my fellow Feathergirl Hubertine, but here is mine….. tadaaaah!

Jacob’s Ladder!

I will be making light and dark variations of the block, my blocks will be 9” finished. I do not know yet how big my quilt will become, how many blocks I will make, I will get an idea of that further into this project.

Dark variation:

Light variation:

I love this block, I like looking at quilts made from this block, I like making it. It makes for a really nice varied and colourful quilt,  I can use a lot of fabrics! Also, it is perfect for our purpose, to do a lot of sewing on our Featherweights, getting to know our Featherweights and in the process make a nice quilt top.

This is what I mean:  there are quite a number of points in the block alone (let’s not even begin thinking of putting the blocks together into a quilt top) where the seams have to come together. Well, this is what happened to me:

And this is what I am aiming for…

My first try at making this block was at the first workshop I took that involved using a sewing machine, so this block was really my initiation into machine patching. After returning to quilting late 2009 and working by hand for over a year, I was curious about patching with a sewing machine, and with  a newly bought sewing machine enrolled in a workshop by Lucy Kramer at the De Sampler in Haarlem. I loved her quilts, having seen them on her blog, so was really happy to get a place, even more so after I found out during the workshop that it was her last season of teaching. Apart from learning some great techniques and getting some good tips, there were more things I took home with me from the workshop that day.

Lucy follows her own path in making her quilts, she is true to her own style, not letting trends etc. get in the way of this. Her quilts are traditional (I can just picture them in a log cabin in the woods somewhere in the US), colourful, cozy, friendly, feminine and inviting, I love them.

I have to admit that in my new found enthusiasm for quilting I have too often let myself be carried away and subscribing to BOM’s etc. They were not around during my first period of quilting, you see. I still find each and every one of these projects beautiful, and enjoy making them, but mostly they are someone else’s choice and I subscribed to so many of them that they are somewhat keeping me from ‘doing my own thing’. My own fault, but there are only so many (quilting) hours in a day and I was spending too many of those hours  executing other people’s ideas, beautiful as they may be. So for me, there is another goal in making this quilt: going back to making my own choices and executing my own ideas.

Thanks Lucy, you showed me a lot more than just making a good quarter inch seam allowance on January 28, 2011!

And now quickly to Hubertine’s blog, Quiltwel,  to look at her choice and then back to my stash to find more combinations for more blocks!

Enjoy your day!

Phyllis