Returning to my quilting group after the summer break I was blown away by a quilt in progress brought in by another member. She explained that she had started it in January and it was a 'challenge' quilt run by Kathryn Kerr from Australia. The idea being that you would do a block a day for 365 consecutive days. I spent a while admiring the progress and looking in detail at the blocks.....so many of them and it still had 3 months to go! The same quilt was being run again for 2019, but when the link for the current year was selected you could still sign up. I signed up for January 2019, but decided that I would actually start from this current year (September) as I just couldn't wait for January!!
The suggested colour theme was darks and lights in a given hue, and as I already had many creams and blue's in my stash only needed to buy some more yardage of white for the background and some dark navy to supplement what I already had. The blocks are either 6" or 3" with some larger 12" corner blocks. As I love to be organised, once I had started cutting strips off my yardage, I began to put them into baskets to make it easier (and tidier) for cutting the pieces. You can see in the picture my labels for 'dark dark', 'dark', 'dark dark medium', 'dark medium', 'medium' and 'light medium'. So far I have only had to do three 6" blocks and they are shown in the top picture.
I have also completed two 12" blocks that took me most of the day to cut and put together! I have never had to do anything so complicated. I have certainly also had to learn to be patient. I have changed completely how I work - in the past I was quite haphazard and not so fussy - but now I am meticulous, slow, careful and quite prepared to repeatedly undo if the points are not perfect! Well you have to otherwise the blocks look terrible. They have to finish accurately otherwise they will not look right when finally sewn together. I have never made such small blocks either - the 3" ones can have elements that are tiny - 1/2" square perhaps. I didn't like making flying geese at the best of times, but to make them to finish 1" x 1/2"...well that has taken some doing for me I can tell you! However, I am now into my 2nd month and my accuracy is good and I am pleased with my results. There are two early blocks though that are not quite right along one edge so I will be re-doing those at some point. Below are my September 3" blocks.
