Twelve Days of Christmas Block of the Month

As promised here is a picture of the Twelve Days of Christmas quilt that I've been working on.  It's a red work and crazy patch quilt (35" x 35").  It will be a block of the month for my Palo Verde Patchers quilt group.  The blocks were inspired by blocks I found on the internet and I then re-designed many of them to fit this quilt.  I also designed the layout.  In the 4 inner and the 4 outer corners are crazy patches made using wool felt.  Each month the handwork group will receive one red work pattern and the directions for 2 hand embroidery stitches to be used on the crazy patches.  I'll be doing the hand embroidery right along with the group.  It should be a fun quilt to make.  I think it will take us longer than a year to make though.  There is quite a lot of red work in the various borders.  That final top border took an age to make even though I was very motivated.  I wanted to get the top finished by today so it could be shown as a sample for sign-ups.  Thankfully I met my goal. 

Twelve Days of Christmas (click to make larger)

Here's a picture of the completed blocks before they were made into a quilt:

 

This is the Block of the Month quilt that I'm leading for this year.  It's called, "Calendar Block of the Month".  It combines redwork and applique.  

This year I also taught the ladies the spray-starch method of applique to use on this quilt.  We discussed quilt labels and what can or should be included on a label.  As a side project, I showed the ladies how to make a felted-wool pin cushion.  They all turned out so cute!

Christmas Block of the Month-Old Fashioned Christmas

The top is now together with the Old Fashioned Christmas redwork blocks.  Now all that's left before the July meeting is to type the step-by-step instructions and I'm finished.  Hope the ladies like it.

Christmas Block of the Month - Traditional Christmas

The second half of the year, our Foothills group is doing a Christmas Block of the Month (BOM).  They'll have a choice of two different designs.   One is traditional Christmas and the other one is an old time Christmas.  I've had the red work blocks finished for a while but needed to put together the tops so I'd have them to show for the introduction to these BOMs.  I finished one this week, just in time for the July meeting when we plan to get it started.

Here's the traditional Christmas quilt:

Here's the old time Christmas quilt in process:

I need to finish it this week too because I have another project that is also due at the July meeting.  The inner ear/positional vertigo problem I've been dealing with for nearly 3 months has put me way behind.  I hate it when I have so much to do at the last minute!  But they're going together smoothly, so that makes me happy.  While I've been making them, I've been writing the step-by-step instructions and snapping photos of each step.  It should be a breeze to get them typed and made into a hand-out - if I can just read my scribbled notes, that is (grin).

Basket Block of the Month

Another post that should have been posted in January:

I'm assisting Ruth with Programs at Foothills Quilters this year and she asked me to lead a Block of the Month.  We decided on a redwork basket quilt.   Here are the blocks I made to show as samples for the first month:

After collecting embroidery basket blocks over the years, it felt like a good time to use them, and put them together into a quilt for this block of the month project. 

And so the planning began..............I searched the internet and found a picture of a quilt with a setting I thought would look good.  Then searched through my stash of magazines to find pieced blocks to go with the embroidery blocks I'd collected.  Oh, and in the process I was able to get my magazine stash all organized, by name of magazine and date, because I kept getting confused by the jumble.  Turns out I had duplicates of quite a few magazines that led to the confusion.  Now all those duplicates have new homes (yeah)!

As it turned out, I couldn't find enough pieced blocks in the search through my magazines, but then thought of The Quick and Easy Block Tool (kind of a book) and, happily, there were enough block patterns in there to make this idea work. 

I decided to design a border for the quilt using embroidered flowers.  Again I went back to the embroidery patterns I'd been saving over the years and found an idea I thought would work.  I turned it into borders and viola.........here is the result.

Here's a better view of the quilt top:

We've now completed with and have shown the first two sets of blocks (January's and February's)  and here are the blocks the Foothills ladies have made so far: