My Modern Quilt Guild decided to do a Block of the Month sew-along this year. A member was familiar with Amy Gibson, her blog Stitchery Dickory Dock, and her BOM The Sugar Block Club. The club features clean designs and are a good opportunity to apply a modern take to traditional blocks. Participants in our guild sew up the block then bring them to share at our monthly meeting.
This seemed like fun, and a good excuse to buy some fabric, so I subscribed to Amy’s blog and the Sugar Block Club. I’ve done a pretty good job of keeping up with the blocks, but not a very good job about blogging about them.
Amy recommended that you chose about 4 yards of focal fabrics to use, along with about 2 yards of background fabric. I choose Moda’s Basic Mixologie by StudioM for the focal fabrics and their Modern Background by ZenChic in Paper for the background.
Basic Mixologie by StudioM for the focal fabric – lots of good colors to choose from
One of the reasons I liked the ZenChic Modern Background line was because of all the fabrics with text on them. However, after I made my first block using a cream fabric with print on it, I found myself really bothered that the scripts wound up in all different directions. Because of this I gave up on the script fabric for a few months and went back to safer options.
When the May block came along I decided it was a good opportunity to try out the text fabric again. It is a paper-pieced block – this is one slice as I pieced it:
I played around with the pieces for awhile to try and get the text fabric to line up in the same direction, but oddly liked it best going in all directions.
All the pieces together – I decided to alternate text background pieces with plain background pieces so it wouldn’t be so busy
The finished block – I really like it!
Here are all my versions of the Sugar Block Club blocks so far:
January and February
March – I like this one
Adding April – the Orange Peels
And now on to June! The new block will be released in just over a week.
Hi Ann, I’m a member of your Miss Bee-Hivin’ group and I was going through our list of members and realized I had not visited your blog yet! I have now done so and am following you. I really like the way your text block turned out. Good choice alternating a plain background! How do you like our blog hop so far? I’m looking forward to getting critiqued. I know I have LOTS of room for improvement.
Hi Janice! Thanks for your comment and for stopping by my blog. I’m enjoying the group and am learning a lot. Almost too much – I’m a bit overwhelmed with all the new things to learn and do. We are doing our critiques this week and it has already been really helpful. Let’s keep in touch!
Great job on the blocks.
I love fabric with text too. Newpaper prints, ads, fancy cursive writing.
I just had a project that I wanted to use a vintage newspaper print on, but things were flipping around in all directions and it didn’t quite work, so I had to go with something less directional.
I think the block you used it in works great!
Thanks you! I’m really happy with the way it turned out…maybe I’ll continue to get more brave with using the text fabrics I like so much.