Very quick update today on my Arkansas Traveler quilt. I finished the blocks! Sewing the four quadrants together for the blocks actually went pretty fast. I think it took about 2 hours to assemble 24 blocks.

I’ve started laying out the blocks for the final top. Sorry about the bad phone photo! I still need to decide on a backing and order that, but things are coming right along!

This post is going to be all over the place. But that’s not always a bad thing, right? I’ve been busy sewing over the last couple of weeks. Not really finishing anything but making good progress.

First up, my Arkansas Traveler quilt. After lots of cutting, sewing diamonds, paper piecing those diamonds, trimming, trimming and trimming, I have 96+ blocks! It really feels like a huge milestone.

You can find a tutorial to make this block on Lee of Freshly Pieced’s site. Those of you with an eagle eye might notice my template is a little different than the one from the Summer Sampler Series. I’m trying out something new Lee came up with, less seams, but maybe a little trickier to assemble the final block, depending on how you feel about sewing together shapes other than squares.

I know I said I wasn’t going to share my final design until I was done. I guess I lied. Here’s the plan! This weekend/next week I’m hoping to finish the quilt top assembly.

As a bit of a personal reward for finishing all those components, I cut into the little pack of Liberty of London Lifestyle fabric I picked up at Quilt Con.

I knew I wanted to pair it with some Essex Linen in Natural. I thought it would look super cute as one of Anna’s Open Wide Pouches. Great pattern, as usual! I made the smallest size because I only had a 10″ zipper on hand. (I bought my metal zipper from Zip It on Etsy.)

The inside is Stamped by Ellen Luckett Baker for Kokka.

This week I also performed a little surgery on my local Modern Quilt Guild challenge quilt top. You can read up on the sadness of unmatching white fabric here.

I finished the top yesterday (happy dance!) and will share the finished quilt next week. That is a promise – it’s due Thursday!

I also have been lucky enough to receive some new fabric in the mail this week.

Windham was kind enough to send some of Lotta Jansdotter’s Glimma Canvas for me to check out. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with canvas so I’m pretty excited to try something out. They also sent a charm pack of Ride, Julia Rothman’s second collection. I seriously love the little bicycle wheels. My son has already claimed this for his own, so I’m thinking of using it in some way to make him a tote bag for the library.

I also had a very happy surprise from Moda Fabrics – three layer cakes of upcoming collections.

These are S’More Love by Eric and Julie Comstock, Simply Style by Vanessa of V and Co, and Honeysweet by Fig Tree & Co. (Seriously, I don’t know how I got so lucky!)

I decided to immediately cut into Vanessa’s fabric because, well, I think she’s pretty fun. I found a block in 163 Favorite Patchwork Patterns : Japanese Craft Book, an awesome book I purchased a few months ago from The Workroom in Canada.

I had some questions on Instagram about this book. It is all in Japanese. There are diagrams that help give ideas about block assembly, but there are no directions or sizes in English. If you like a challenge and are good at figuring things out, this is the book for you. I do, and really, what do you have to lose except a little bit of fabric? Keeps my old mind sharp.

So anyway, I picked this cool design…

And started to layout a couple blocks…

And then something funny happened. I made these up at pretty much the exact same time Lee was writing up her post to announce her planned Bloom Bloom Pow Quilt Along with a very similar block! Yesterday morning we had a good laugh about how we must be totally on the save wave length after writing the book together. So! If you like the block, are interested in making the block, you are in luck because Lee’s about to start her quilt along and will have tutorials for you. Her block just has some great additional shading.

Phew! I hope some of you made it through all that! Next week is Spring Break here. (As I ignore the -4 degree wind chill and snow outside…) I’m not really sure if that means I’ll get more sewing done (not driving the kids all over the place) or less (more play time with the kids!). We’ll see. My newly 4 year old wants to put on a kid art show in the house, so we have big crafting plans. Very exciting! Have a great weekend everyone!

I have a few works in progress that have been occupying my time this week. The Naperville Modern Quilt Guild is currently doing a “log cabin challenge”, due at the end of March. All the quilts have to be 36″ x 36″ finished and use log cabins in some way. I was throwing a few idea around in my head, but in the end decided to make white log cabins with pops of color throughout them. I had a vision in my mind….they probably won’t be ALL white in the end. But I’ll wait to share the finished quilt in a couple weeks.

And if you are on Instagram, you probably know about my very, very sad moment with one of these blocks. The biggest one. (of course!) When I started sewing, I pulled some whites out of my scrap bin, before I continued to sew the block with white yardage off a bolt. Horrible idea!

Mistake block, before it got bigger

I brought my block down into natural light yesterday and discovered there are 4 logs in the center that don’t match the rest of the blocks. I think the scrap bin white was a Free Spirit White and the yardage is Moda Bella Solid White. And although many on Instagram suggested I leave it or work some other whites into the blocks, it wasn’t in my vision, so I’m going to attempt to rip it out. And if that doesn’t work, I’m just going to remake the whole thing. You’ll probably hear me crying all the way from my sewing room to yours!

I’ve also been working on my special-quilt-gift-project. Remember this stack of fabric? They’ve been cut and are in the middle of piecing.

Someone guessed correctly that I’m making Arkansas Traveler blocks.

I’ll leave the final layout as a surprise! Ok, now off to shovel the driveway for the 4th time in less than 24 hours. Please someone tell me Spring is coming soon!

Last week I finished my latest round of The Traveling Quilts Bee. This iteration, I had Elizabeth of Oh, Fransson’s quilt. No pressure, right?

Elizabeth’s quilt is 80′s themed. She found some really, really bright fabrics to send along with the quilt. I’m talking neon! This is how the quilt looked when I received it.

So many people had already added amazing things to the quilt. Check out the Pac Man by Monica! Genius.

I was going back and forth on a few ideas. MTV logo, Cindy Lauper silhouette. In the end, I’m not that good of a sewist for those. But I knew I could do a Rubik cube! I did a little searching on Google Images and found a nice Rubik graphic. I opened it up in Photoshop and traced the lines to come up with a bit of a paper piecing template.

I printed the image out and cut it into sections based on each side of the Rubik Cube. Then I cut those sides into strips and paper pieced each strip.

Once I had the strips sewn together to form each side, I pieced them together as I would any Y-Seam. That was a little trickier than anything I’ve done, as I not only had to line up the y-seam, but also the seams of the color squares on the Rubik Cube.

Elizabeth’s quilt also uses some black and white prints. I dug around in my stash and found this older Seagull print (Alexander Henry I think?). Since this is an 80′s themed quilt, I thought it was a bit clever and reminded me of the band Flock of Seagulls. Hopefully you don’t hate the band Elizabeth!

I’ve mailed the quilt on to Ashley and am excited to see what she adds!