A new plan for all the Fig Tree Quilts fabrics and blocks

 I have a teeny tiny, overflowing but totally necessary stash of Fig Tree Quilts fabrics. You can read about it here.
 I had decided to do a Farmer's Wife quilt, and restarted it in September, but the thing is I hate templates and I'm not the biggest paper piecing fan. So about half the blocks I just plain ol' don't want to do.

 But I'm still in love with the idea of an all Fig Tree sampler quilt. It still represents my quilting journey to me. And I have a LOT of Fig Tree fabrics.
 This is just the yardage.

As this seems to be the year of the sampler online I've decided to join a few, make the blocks I like or look to teach me something new or I just love enough to make with pp or templates.

 First up is the Moda Sampler Shuffle. I've been getting the blocks from Fat Quarter Shop's blog but they're around on several shops sites and I assume the Moda blog.

I've got 17 done between a small sewing frenzy and a few that are the same as the Farmer's Wife Quilt.

Next is the Splendid Sampler from Pat Sloan and Jane Davidson. It starts Feb 14th and has over 100 blocks so I know there will be plenty to make from that!


I decided to throw in a few 12" blocks, all the others are 6" finished, Just so I don't need the like 200+ blocks I would have had to make for a king size sampler. I want it about 100" and haven't decided if I want to add borders or not. I figure that's a decision for another day.

I've added Aurifil's block of the month quilt along and I really liked Fat Quarter Shop's Single Ring blocks so made one of them up for a few of the 12". I figure I can hide 10-12 of the large blocks without them taking over.

Total 6" block total so far = 49

What are you up? Do you have a certain style you have a lot of? Or that represents something to you?

Don't forget to follow me on Instagram or Twitter to see what I'm up to. I post there much more frequently then I do here.

Farmer's Wife/Mistress Revisted

I pulled out my Farmer's Wife quilt blocks that I'm doing in all Fig Tree Quilt fabrics and made a few more blocks! I'm going to run out of blocks I can do without either printing the templates or paper piecing and I'm really not sure I want to fool around with either of those right now.  

 Each of these has Cinnamon Stars fabrics, and my obsession is showing I know! But this was one of those early lines I was able to track some down and I'm not ashamed to say I'm kinda proud of that fact. It was fun.

I now have 29 of the blocks done. I still have no idea how many I'll ended up making, and I have several ideas for not in the book blocks I may through in.

Have you restarted any old projects lately?

FNSI results, some more QAL blocks and news

hehehe I flaked on posting my sewing from the Friday Night Sew In. Mostly I had a Friday Night Cut Up. I used the Big Shot to cut a whole lot of 1.5" hexagons from Bari J's Lilly Belle fabrics. This stuff makes me so happy. As I was playing with it I noticed the feel is different then most quilt fabrics. It's closer to a batik feel and I asked Bari about it and she said that Art Gallery fabrics are a higher thread count then most of the industry, which you can very much feel.
The Big Shot makes cutting super fast. I can cut 24 hexies at a time! The die has 4 and I can do up to 6 layers at a time accurately. 

     I also made two more blocks for my Fig Tree Farmer's Mistress Quilt, but only one of them is actually from the books. I made a granny square block, which seems to be all the rage right now around blog world, and a a lightening bolt block.

 I love making these smaller blocks, I normally make 12" blocks but these are only 6 so they seem so cute. For those who are wondering you need 1.5" (unfinished) squares to get a 6" (finished) granny square block.

And for the news! Starting July 31st  there will be a daytime Talkin Tuesday! Now there are TWO chats! One starts at 1pm ET and the other at 9pm ET. I've had a lot of requests from the Europeans and some others who can't join in the evening chat so I'm adding a daytime one. The earlier chat will be #talknt2 and the evening the original #talknt.
I'm going to run the daytime chat on a trial basis for about 4 or 6 weeks to see how it takes before committing to making it permanent.

Fig Tree Farmer's Mistress Quilt

I knew from the start there was no way I'd keep up with the Farmer's Wife QAL so along with a few others I termed us the Farmer's Mistress, around when I want it, but no commitment. Which is exactly how it has turned out.
There is a flickr group devoted to those doing the quilt, and most are doing 3 a week I think.
I'd decided from the start I was going to use only Fig Tree Quilts fabric since Joanna's fabric has played a huge part in my quilting journey.
She was the first designer I was drawn to and learned about the whole idea of lines, designer fabric etc.
My first attempt at sewing without a pattern, and quilting and binding was with Urban Indigo.

My first Moda Bake Shop project used Whimsy.

   So as you can see a lot of firsts with Fig Tree.

 Since I knew this quilt was going to be a long term project, taken out and put away many times, using lots of different techniques, I figured an all Fig Tree quilt would be representative of my journey.
My plan was, and still is, to have at least one fabric from each of Joanna's line in the quilt. That is 22 lines at present. And some of the lines are impossible to find, especially her first two, which came out before I got hooked. Thankfully Joanna has a few scraps left and has agreed to send me some, and a few others I've recently found because of destash sales, or shop that weren't online now being online. So I'm pretty sure eventually ever line will be represented in at least two fabrics.

Since my first introduction into the world of fabric a lot has changed, and my tastes have grown and altered as well. I still love Fig Tree, the sweet nostalgic feel, soft colours, and romantic prints, but I've also fallen in love with more modern designers, and some which don't really fit any description except "I like!".
But this quilt will be only Fig Tree.

So why am I telling you all this now? or again I think.

Because the other day I was feeling kind of blah and wanted to sew but didn't think I had the right mind set to work on anything important, like new pattern projects etc, so I pulled out the box of Fig Tree and my Farmer's Wife book and made 5 new blocks.
 
 One of them isn't in the book, I just made it for the heck of it. And you can see I was definitely feeling blues. Oddly I didn't use my favorite blues, which are from Urban Indigo, Folklorique and California Girl.

I now have 10 of the 111 blocks. Yeah so not getting this done anytime soon. Especially since I'm doing the math to figure these all out without templates because that STILL blows my mind, how any editor in this day and age of quilting thought a quilt book using only templates was a good idea, especially when sooooo many of the blocks are simple and we all use rotary cutters now.