Category: Marjorie’s Quilting Bee

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Block 11 – Triangle Tesselation Qube Workout QAL

Happy Monday! It’s August and the weather is cooler here in North Carolina. This week’s block is another block made in quarters. You may have noticed that some blocks are made in a 9-patch configuration which lends itself to “rows” and other blocks are made in a 4-patch configuration. You may have wondered how these blocks are designed. Here’s my starting point for this 4-patch configuration. I took a quarter of a block with a line drawing, turned the line drawing in each quadrant and then colored and re-colored it until it was pleasing. Here’s the base quadrant.

And here’s the set of blocks made from the starting quadrant. Click on the pictures below or click on the menu at the top of this page to find the patterns.

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Block 9 – Sailboats Qube Workout QAL

It’s a rainy and cool July Monday in NC. The relief from the heat is truly welcome. And the block this week is called Sailboats and is perfect for a wet day. It is an abstracted version of the sailboat blocks that we usually see.

You can find Block 9 here in our 10th installment of this QAL.

 

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Castle Wall – Block 8 of the QAL Sampler

Good morning! It’s Monday again and time for some new blocks. These blocks were fun to design. (you know my Dad and my husband have both always said, “if you’re not having fun, do something else”) But these blocks are fun. This design started with the chisel. And the block for the Mix & Match Corners Qube is all Chisels except for the center Square on Point subunit. And the Mix & Match Angles Qube uses the Kite shape which is just perfect for that block. And finally, we get to use Shape 8 which is the rectangle for the Mix & Match Qube. This is a link to the page with the new blocks.

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Quilt Settings: Circle of Nine

One of my favorite quilt settings comes from a book by Janet Houts and Jean Ann Wright called Best of Circle of Nine. I haven’t used it since I made the Sister’s Choice quilt for my sister in 2016. However, in making the sampler quilts for the Facebook AccuQuilt Qube group and thinking about settings, it came to mind again. And it gave me a wonderful setting for some other blocks that have been sitting waiting to be used.

As I always say, quilts come about in their own time. And this star quilt has finally come to it’s time. This is a picture of my progress with these stars and this setting.

Floating Stars
Floating Stars in Circle of Nine setting

And this is an image from EQ with borders added to complete the quilt. This is so much better than a horizontal or on point setting with sashing.

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Under My Needle in the Eye of the Storm

Elsa came through this week on her way to the Northeast with a little wind and a lot of rain. I decided to bind a couple of quilts that were waiting. The first one was for my granddaughter. She’s worked on it off and on for a couple of years. She’s a good stitcher, but prefers working with animals and playing softball. It’s a beautiful quilt and I used a pantograph called Batiks to quilt it. I also volunteered to bind it for her.

Rail Fence
Rail Fence

The second quilt is one that I made with a charm pack. It’s just a split nine patch and is lap sized. It’s a Riley Blake fabric. It is a pretty quilt and the fabrics are beautiful. Sometimes it feels good just to do something quick and easy and finish.

Split 9-patch
Split 9-patch

Sherry and I had lunch on Friday. It’s so nice to go out to lunch again for good food and good company. It was a great way to finish the week. Many of our favorite restaurants in Chapel Hill are no longer open, and we miss them. Fortunately one of our favorite places in Graham is still open and it was nice to eat there.

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Color Challenge – Block 7 of the Qube Workout Sampler

This week is going to be fun. We’re taking the Blocks from last week’s Sampler and doing a color challenge. Sometimes when drawing these blocks, I look at the uncolored diagrams, and without color, a completely different block appears in my mind. That happened with last week’s blocks when I was creating them and thus, we got this week’s blocks from that. It was so much fun that I almost couldn’t keep it a secret. But here they are. I hope you love them as much as I do. You will find instructions here.

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Vortex – Block 5 of the Qube Workout Sampler

New blocks have been posted on the QAL page. This block is called Vortex because, again, it rotates around a Square on Point or Economy Block subunit. There are three versions – one for the Mix & Match Qube, one for the Angles Companion Qube, and one for the Corners Companion Qube.

This has been an interesting week. I thought that when school was out last Tuesday that it would be smooth sailing, but one of the days was spent getting Ezri’s covid vaccination. It took over half an hour on the phone to register her for the vaccination and then when we got there, they had no record of it. However, we had been given a registration number over the phone and also via text message so there was no problem with her getting the shot. Except that we were the only ones there and they wanted to wait to open a vial until more people came. After waiting quite a while and no one else came, they opened the vial and gave her the shot. Everyone was very pleasant and when Ezri came over the next day she seemed to suffer no side effects from the vaccination.

Ezri also came over every day last week because she wanted to sew. It is wonderful to see her stitching away and finally using the iron and pressing her own piecing. She still lets that right arm hang at her side instead of using two hands for things, but she’s getting the job done.

Have a happy quilting day!

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Star Soiree – Block 4 of the Qube Workout Sampler

Block 4 is here. For this design I started with a simple friendship star for the Mix & Match Qube and worked into some additional stars for the Angles and Corners Companion Qubes. While the friendship star design is fairly traditional, the piecing of it is not. Usually one sees this done with all half square triangles. This block presents a challenge because some of the seams can be eliminated to give a smoother, more cohesive block using shapes like the quarter square triangle and the parallelogram.

In the Angles Companion block, the trapezoid is repeated for a double trapezoid block. Color placement will dictate unique designs in this block. And in the Corners Companion, a simpler design is used that looks similar to a variable star, but because it is a six-patch, one gets more points and accents of the center points of the star with the bowtie units.

In other news, we went to my nephew’s wedding this weekend. It was so much fun and fairly non-traditional. They wanted simple and chose to have the wedding venue as a tent in a pasture on the bride’s grandfather’s farm. The bride has her own animals there, so it was truly “home” for her. It was delightful and we feasted on BBQ prepared by the groom with beverages served from a bar made of stacked hay bales while cattle and a few donkeys and horses grazed nearby. Here’s a picture of the bride and groom.

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Jewel Box Quilt – Which Block?

One of my favorite quilts is a Jewel Box Quilt and one only has to do an internet search for Jewel Box Quilt to find many, many beautiful quilts. The scrappy quilts are Jewel Boxes, but also wonderful are the ones done in coordinated colorways.

Sometimes the inspiration for a quilt is the fabric one has and for some reason (maybe four granddaughters) I have collected a fair amount of pink fabric including an entire bolt of Riley Blake Bee Basics pink plus another large piece of Riley Blake Crayola pink. Thus, the inspiration for a Jewel Box Quilt came my way.

This is the typical piecing configuration for the Jewel Box Block and can be found in the AccuQuilt Library as Block PQ10554:

Playing around with this in EQ, this is how this block appears in a quilt:

However, as I began to work making four patches and half square triangles with my pink fabric, I found that I had four of the same fabric together in the corners as you can see with the dark green and dark blue in the layout above. And when I mixed the lighter pinks into the four patches to get a mixture in the corners, the chain effect created by the 4-patch subunits was completely washed out. I went back to the drawing board.

As it turned out, the two pinks mixed nicely with the triangles and the darker pink worked much better to create the chain effect. And to get a nicer chain effect so that the solid square in the middle balanced the triangles, sashing and cornerstones were added. In the end, the original design was made into two separate blocks – one with squares and one with triangles as seen below.

This is still a work in progress, but so far I am pleased with it.

Uneven 9-Patch Block:

Triangle Block:

Work in Progress:

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Scottie Dog Applique Quilt Tutorial

This is one of my favorite quilts. The fabric I used came from my Mother. She always wanted to make a Scottie dog quilt. She had this little one yard or maybe a little more blue fabric and in making this quilt, I used every last scrap of it. But when it was time to bind it, there wasn’t enough fabric. Amazingly, I found a perfect blue (from Mother’s stash that I inherited) to match the blue in the Scottie dog fabric.

 

 

I used the AccuQuilt GO! 8″ and 12″ Qubes to make this quilt, but you can use individual dies or rotary cutting. 

Connector Block Cutting Instructions

2″ Finished Square (Cut 48 black dot, cut 48 light blue)

  • Shape 2 – AccuQuilt GO! 8″ Qube
  • Rotary Cut 2-1/2″ square

4″ Finished Square (Cut 24 light blue, cut 6 medium blue)

  • Shape 1 – AccuQuilt GO! 8″ Qube or
  • Rotary cut 4-1/2″ square

Applique Block Cutting Instructions

6″ Finished Half Square Triangle (cut 24 light blue)

  • Shape 3 – AccuQuilt GO! 12″ Qube or
  • Rotary cut 6-7/8″ Square and cut once diagonally to make two finished 6″ HSTs

6″ Finished Quarter Square Triangle (cut 24 black dot)

  • Shape 4 – AccuQuilt GO! 12″ Qube or
  • Rotary cut 7-3/16″ square and cut twice diagonally to make 4 finished 6″ QSTs

6″ Finished Square for embroidery (cut 6 light blue)

Border Cutting Instructions

  • Inner Border – cut 5 strips 2-1/2″ x WOF (width of fabric)
  • Outer Border – cut 6 strips 3-1/2″ x  WOF
  • Binding – cut 6 strips 2-1/2″ x WOF

Quilt Layout and Construction