A Prairie Home Quilts

I’m behind in posting pictures of the finished blocks for my Inklingo Sampler.   [What's new?] This is Friendship Star.  Instructions for this block were posted on 17 July 2009 on the Inklingo Sampler blog.

I love doing HST with Inklingo.  I printed on the back of the light fabric, put it on top of the dark fabric [RST], sewed on the dotted lines and cut on the solid lines.  Voilà.  Precise HST are easy with Inklingo without using paper that you have to pick off.  And I don’t know about you, but I always found it difficult to sew straight, even lines on either side of the center line when I used the method that involves cutting a larger square and marking a line down the center to make HST.  Here is Linda’s video showing how to do HST with Inklingo.

Nice, huh?

Block Two of the Inklingo Sampler was posted on 10 July 2009.  It’s a simple 9 patch block.  Here is mine in batiks.  I don’t have all the Inklingo collections so I’m not sure I’ll be able to do all the blocks Tilde will be posting.  I’ve combed through the block library in EQ6 and may add in a few of my own block ideas.  I think I’d like to do some 3″, 9″ & 12″ blocks to mix things up a bit when the sampler is going together into a finished top.  I like that mismatched block look in sampler quilts.

A few posts back, after I listed all my projects and promptly fainted, I had a heart-t0-heart with myself about my long list.  I decided I needed to whittle it down.  [Ha! Yeah, so you could add more projects to it without feeling so guilty. Oh hush, Guilty Conscience.  No one asked you!] One of the things I did was to stop kidding myself that I was going to get all those cute, free BOMs done.  I think there were about 5 or 6 of them previously listed on my sidebar.  I’d been saving the patterns but never actually making the blocks.  So I put a stop to that madness and even cleared some space on my hard drive by deleting all the PDFs.

I half-heartedly decided I was only going to do Guute’s Antique Quilt. But then reality set in. I really couldn’t justify spending money for background and reproduction fabrics when I really needed to use the money for the quilts on my “to do” list that are much more important.  [So now my Guilty Conscience was feeling all smug, but my Muse was not amused.] About that time, Tilde announced she was starting up an Inklingo Sampler quilt–a new block listed on her blog each week and made with Inklingo.  That sounded intriguing.  A sampler quilt that I could make with scraps.  Batik scraps.  The leftovers from my Top Secret–Area 51–Nevada quilt.  [The Guilty Conscience tried to raise his ugly head, but my Muse subdued him.  She's strong like that.] [Sorry, I don't know where some of these side comments are coming from, but I'm cracking myself up at least.]

Block One:  LeMoyne Star

A new block will be posted every Friday on the Inklingo Sampler blog.  Instructions for Block One are here and pictures of other completed blocks are here.  I used the  Inklingo 6″ LeMoyne Star collection for this block instead of the Inklingo Free 4.5″ LeMoyne Star collection.  We are only on the fourth block so there’s plenty of time to catch up if you’d like to join us.

This is the pattern I laid out in EQ5 after joining the Great Hexagon Quilt Along. Some of the quilters there are doing a diamond hexagon mosaic quilt based on this antique one. [Click on the picture there to see the larger view of this quilt!] The pattern name for this mosaic hexagon quilt is Martha Washington’s Flower Garden according The Quilt Index.

I like to name my projects so I’ve decided to name this one I’m Not Martha. The most obvious reason is that — I’m no Martha Stewart. [shocking, I know.]  My children can attest to that. My mother would probably chime in there too.  Do my kids care that I’m not more like Martha? Nah.  Do I want to be more like Martha?  Nope.  [There is the whole biblical Mary vs. Martha analogy working into the naming of the quilt, but I'll save that for another time. . .]

In the spirit of not being like Martha Stewart and also as a reminder for me of times that we currently find ourselves living in, I decided to see how frugally I could make this quilt.  I want it to have an antique look  as a  reminder or link to the past also [definitely not as 1930-ish looking as the EQ5 drawing!] so I’m trying to go with as many vintage-looking and reproduction fabrics as I can.  And since my Field of Flowers hexagon quilt is .75″ hexagons and pretty much from scraps, I decided to make this one with 1.25″ hexagons which requires bigger pieces of fabric.  There will be no looking in the scrap bins for suitable fabrics for this one.  I’m sure for some of you this wouldn’t be much of a challenge because you could just go shop your stash, but my frugal ways and being a single parent of 4 has not allowed for large stash building.  What will probably trip me up is needing a certain color of fabric and not having the money at the moment to be able buy any, but I will persevere.  *smile*

The challenge then for this quilt is to spend as little money as possible, give it an antique look, have it be a controlled scrappy quilt by making 7 diamonds each of color — red, blue, yellow, green, orange, and purple, use gray around all the diamonds, use black fabric for the center of each diamond, use 1 red fabric as a connector in the center of each of the 6 diamonds and find a special fabric to use as the flower in the very center.  I have my work cut out for me!

I have pulled the fabrics from my meager [and I do mean, m-e-a-g-e-r] stash that will be suitable to use and started printing hexagons for the diamonds.  I will definitely need to purchase or swap for fabrics to coordinate with what I have.  I plan to purchase only fabric that is on sale though.  I have yardage of a gray muslin-like fabric that I bought several years ago to use on my original GFG quilt design that I’m not using anymore because that design morphed into  my Field of Flowers quilt.  I’ve got that fabric cut and have printed some of the 550 hexagons that go around all the diamonds.  Oh, and did I mention that I want to do 1 hexagon diamond a week with the goal to have this top together a year from now??  So far I’ve spent $12.  I purchased 6 FQs for $1 each and spent $6 on 3 FQs for $1 each plus shipping.  I have 1 yellow diamond hexagon done.