My Old MacDonald Sampler Blocks for February
Here are my 7 ground cover snails for the sampler.
Lori
What If …
What if you won a set of 48 blocks this month? What if you’re not so motivated to make a “brown” quilt? What if you really wanted to make a big quilt and don’t want to make a gazillion more 6 inch snails trails blocks?
Here’s one idea. Make some of the larger 12-inch snails trails in a completely different color-way and mix them up … in a organized, alternate block way or in a more random fashion like this. Find the pattern for the 12 inch block on Quilter’s Cache.
I used purples, blues and teals for my big Snails, but a more constrained palette would work well, too.
What do you think?
Playing with the Snails (Trails)
Earlier this month on his blog, Wayne Kollinger had some fun with the Snail’s Trail block, using a technique he called Old Block Plus. He starts with the traditional block and then adds a sort of pieced border around each one to create some wonderful patterns when they are put together. Here is one example of the new block and a quilt made from it.
There are several more interesting variations in this post: Old Block Plus: Snail’s Trail
Which Do You Prefer?
For January and February, we have made/are making blocks where the main fabric color is pretty narrowly defined–Blue or Purple in January, Brown in February–and there is more variation of colors allowed in the light backgrounds. I have always loved scrappy backgrounds in all kinds of quilts and was thinking of continuing this kind of fabric guideline for the background in upcoming blocks, but … what do you think?
There aren’t a lot of choices here–I really just wanted to take the pulse of the group. If you have your own ideas about interesting background colors/combinations that you’d like to see in future lotto blocks, please share in the comments.
Sophie’s Samplers – Snail’s Trails
I’ve finished my blocks for the pair of samplers I’m making with this year’s blocks.
Here are my blocks for the scrap happy graduated sampler. Because I plan to put them in the upper right corner, where they will be surrounded by scrappy red and orange setting rectangles, I choose warm “browns” and used a light gold for some of the alternate color.
I also started cutting some of those red and orange rectangles for the setting from my stash so I could see how the upper corner of the quilt might look.
For my Old MacDonald’s Mystery Sampler, I decided to imagine a southwest landscape as my color inspiration and for my “ground cover” chose lighter browns and sage-y greens.
FYI, the quilt design for the mystery sampler is definitely NOT southwest inspired … I just decided to use what I see around me as color inspiration for my quilt, constrained by what I can find in my stash 😉
Throwback Thursday – March 2002 Lotto Blocks
In March, 2002, we also made Snail’s Trail/Monkey Wrench blocks. These are most of the 34 blocks that were made in the third month of the first year of the Block Lotto.
I think I am the only one still around from the list of makers: Dorothy, Elaine, Ivy, Jana, Jeri, Jessica, Kit, Marcia, Mary Pat, Sherri, Vicky and me.
These are completely scrappy 12-inch blocks, made using Marcia Hohn’s Monkey Wrench pattern on The Quilter’s Cache. As it turned out Marcia herself won the blocks and I was lucky enough to be able to see the quilt top alive and in person later that year when we both attended the Vermont Quilt Festival. I am sure I took a photo of us looking at it in the parking lot … but I can’t find it.
Marcia received a challenging set of blocks and was one of the people who pushed me to create color rules for the Block Lotto so that the blocks the winners received would play nicely together … though you know I cannot resist a completely scrappy month or two, even now, 14 years later.
You can see all 34 blocks that were made way back when in my Flickr album Monkey Wench.There are some examples of some scrappy blocks made from many fabrics and you can see for yourself what works and (maybe) what doesn’t work so well.
Birds in the Air
I am so excited that I won these! I love them and they are in my husband’s favorite colors!
Thanks so much everyone!
Congratulations to all the lucky WINNERS!
Looking forward to see all the birds flying in beautiful formations on your quilts!!