OK, so I'm a little way behind (I blame Amazon, for being unable to deliver my book the microsecond I ordered it, frankly), but here are blocks one and two from The Farmer's Wife quilt (in this household it is already nicknamed The Draughtsman's Wife). I believe the rest of the quilt along are getting stuck into week three. Hey ho.
After a minor mishap with block one (tip: when instructed to ensure that your print settings are set to 'print at full size' or equivalent, it's worth doing so. My 5 1/2" block is very sweet, but not terribly useful), I made pretty quick progress - block notes below.
Block 1 - Attic Windows
- I don't have a selvege from the grey, so no idea what it is. The brighter blue is from City Weekend by Oliver + S, the light blue a cloud fabric from my stash (I have a vague feeling it's a Makower fabric, but I could be wrong), the white is a random organic white.
- It's thanks to Katy that the text fabric reads the right way up when on point. Wouldn't have occurred to me otherwise.
- I could easily have done the maths for this block, but I decided to get in the template practise, so did it entirely from the template CD that comes with the book.
Block 2 - Autumn Tints
- The blue is a treasured Liberty Art fabric from the quilt exhibition at the V&A last year. This is the first time I have cut into any of the fabrics I bought there (you'll need to scroll down that post), the yellows are scraps from the sunshine quilt, and more random organic white.
- I kind of wish I'd used at least one paler yellow, but hopefully this slightly bolder block won't stand out too much in 109 blocks' time.
- Even I couldn't bring myself to use the templates for this one. The maths took approximately eight seconds.
Along with a handful of others in the group, I'm working my way through the blocks in chronological order, because I know that otherwise I'd just leave myself all the tricky ones till the end.
I've faintly surprised myself by also enormously enjoying reading the letters that accompany the quilt blocks (I'm treating myself to a letter per pair of blocks at the moment). They are the kind of inclusion that normally I would ignore as a bit whimsical and unnecessary, but actually they offer a genuinely fascinating insight into the lives of a certain segment of the American population in the 1920s, more or less untouched by the right to vote, the flapper phenomenon or, indeed, many of the things that epitomise 1920s America to me, a 20-something Brit.
Oh, and for those of you getting cross with the one-teeny-template-perA4-sheet situation, I've also made a kind-of-tutorial (I hesitate to term it an actual tutorial in the face of all of the perfectly photographed and clearly explained how-tos that other bloggers put together) on printing out the templates in a slightly less wasteful way. I'm sure it's not remotely revolutionary, but maybe it'll save you a bit of paper - look out for it tomorrow.
