I’ve written about this project before (here, here and here), but the short story is that my Modern Quilt Guild decided to do Amy Gibson’s (of Stitchery Dickory Dock) Sugar Block Club BOM this year. The club features clean designs and are a good opportunity to apply a modern take to traditional blocks.
I did a good job of keeping up with the blocks and actually finished the December block on time, and early in December. From there, it was all about figuring out how to put the quilt top together.
I really wanted to avoid doing a very standard grid-like layout for a bunch of reasons. First, I’ve done that before! Second, I wanted to do something that had a lot of negative space so I could practice some machine quilting. Third, I had a bunch of background fabric left over from the BOM that I wanted to use up.
I played around awhile with some drawings and eventually came up with this sketch. The shaded areas are the 12 blocks, and the lettered boxes are the background pieces. I grouped the pieces into common sizes to plan out the cutting.
With the plan in hand, I spend the day on New Years’ Eve day cutting up my background fabrics to the planned sizes – trying to get a balanced mix of the different types. From there, the assembly began. This is my ironing board set up in front of the window in my sewing room – looking out on the last day of 2016!
It took some time to get it together, and to get the balance of the different background fabrics looking right. Here is the top all together – taken in the sunlight of the morning of New Years’ Day!
I’m pretty happy with it. I think the blocks wound up weighted more heavily toward the bottom and I’d like to adjust that, but I’m not sure how to fix it easily. I’ll probably sit on it a bit before making a final decision, and I do still have some quilting practice to do before I’m ready to finish this one up. But I’m mostly happy with how this came out – happy I took a bit of a risk to do a very alternative layout that will give me lots of space for fun quilting.