I may not break any sound barriers while piecing at my beloved Erie Mae (Bernina 1230) like the great Chuck Yeager did with his jet plane, but I surely am going like gangbusters with my Blackford's Beauty blocks started in Bonnie Hunter's "Jared Takes a Wife" class last month. I have 22 blocks and finishing more as I speak.
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| Blocks--All Scrappy except for Constant Fabric in Large and Small Star Points |
I came so close to running out of the black print used for the large star points...would you believe just what a little bit was left?
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| FIVE INCHES by the Width of the Fabric!! |
That is about 1/8 of a yard! But do you know what? I wasn't the least bit worried because I remembered what a quilter of olden times did when she ran out of a fabric. Ladies out on the prairie (or in the case of my family, down in the holler) just substituted something on hand that was pleasing. No desperate online searches or notices placed in quilt guild newsletters begging for the sought-after fabric.
I have always thought that it gave those antique quilts a special flair that could not be achieved by design, only by happenstance and letting go of rigid ideas about how it "has" to be. It is good to do our best work up to a point (but if we ever achieved perfection, how boring would that be!
I have started to think about sashing strip fabric! After auditioning several, I found a chrome yellow with red and black printing that I really like with my blocks. I'm not really sure but I may have bought this length of old fabric (maybe 30+ years old!) at a thrift store while on a road trip.
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| So Far, My Front-Runner for Sashing |
I tried some prints for cornerstone squares, but nothing worked. I finally realized that all the prints were too busy and the cornerstone squares needed to provide a resting place for the eye. I plan to use solid burgundy for these squares.
Genie
Very pretty blocks!
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