This year I joined a block-of-the-month club at a local quilt shop!  I  paid a flat fee and then I have to pay if I miss a month or don’t finish my block from the previous month.  I figure it’ll get me to sit down at my machine at least once a month and it has!  And it’s been fun!  The blocks are a challenge but a fun challenge.

So…  once a month I sit down with a pile of fabrics and a bunch of rulers and get cutting!

I picked the “Alaskan Wildflowers” colorway.  The main fabric– those wildflowers– are in every block.

They give good cutting instructions but not enough fabric to cover even one mistake!  So you have to be pretty careful.

The other thing is they use Marti Michell’s “templates,” which are numbered templates for every shape you’ll need.  When I signed up they said “do you want to buy the templates?  Most people buy the templates.” I said I’d try it without (after all, I find the measuring and cutting pretty fun and it would have nearly doubled the cost of the club!) and she said “you’ll probably end up buying them later.”  …Which sounded like a challenge.

I haven’t bought the templates!

I won’t buy the templates!

But anyway… it’s cool if you use the templates.

I hardly ever sit at my cutting mat, but for these, I have a seat and take my time…  and soon enough I had stacks that looked like this:

Another fun thing is we can swap out the fabrics they give us for other fabrics.  Last month there was a fabric I just didn’t like, so I ended up switching it out.  If you use it at least twice it all looks intentional, so I swapped out a dark red for this blueberry fabric.

Everything went together pretty uneventfully…  we did have to “swirl” a seam, which I understood but still had to google.  It makes the seam lay flatter when you have lots of layers.

And we sewed some weird shapes that I’m not used to sewing!  But it turns out it’s because that big triangular white piece gets sewn on last.

Here it is!  All sewn up.  You can see the tiny picture they give us– theirs was red on red and mine ended up more blue on blue… and I really like it!

Here’s the progress so far.  I’ve done 6 months, 6 more to go!  I’ve already started planning how I want to finish it up and set the blocks.  I know I want them to be on-point (diamonds instead of squares).  It sure is pretty!

All in all, a fun Saturday activity!