Choices Choices

Too many ideas are floating around my head as to how I want to sew together this dang summer sampler quilt top. It's driving me insane...I even dreamed about it last night. Using my trusty illustrator/photoshop skills (see my college degree wasn't for naught!) I made a few mock ups of potential quilt tops. Do you have a favorite? Or perhaps another idea that isn't even here yet?

I'm linking up to Fabric Tuesday at Quilstory

More Summer Sampler Fun

Well I finally finished piecing all the summer sampler blocks. It certainly was time consuming but I am liking how they turned out. I have been playing around with layout ideas in my head and just need to decide what type of sashing to do. I'm leaning towards purple or gray sashing (does anyone else think it would be slightly strange since I don't have any purple in the quilt) but making my blocks different sizes and randomly placing them around the quilt. Haven't decided on that yet though.

Anyway here's a rundown of the blocks I finished up this weekend.

Block # 7: Six Pointed Star. Now no offense to anyone out there, but I hated making this block. Sewing all those triangles together annoyed me for some reason and I'm not sure I like how it looks with the solids. All in all, I'm not very happy with it and am seriously contemplating making a new one. Although I think I might make one that uses one inch string pieces like the Rocky Road to Kansas and maybe even uses paper piecing to avoid sewing all those triangles if I can figure out a template to use that avoids y seams. We'll see how ambitious I feel later.

Block # 8: Lucky Pieces. I had a hard time deciding on the colors for this block. I sat stumped for a little bit before deciding to create a mockup of this block in Illustrator and played around with the colors until I got to a combination I liked the best.

Block # 9: Minnesota. When I first saw this block I really struggled with the color placement because I was trying to go with an all white background for my squares and the original minnesota block has hourglasses instead of the diamonds on the sides. I finally decided to change it up a bit and after experimenting with different color placement, decided I liked this version a little better. 

Block # 10: Evening Star. This is one of my favorite blocks in the entire series and one of the many reasons I decided to make this quilt in the first place. It was a breeze to put together and I think an entire quilt with a variation of this might be in my future 

Block 11: Rocky Road to Kansas. Making this block was super easy...the hardest part was sewing all those one inch strips to the paper...luckily I had an episode or two of Mad Men to keep me company (Holy cow have you ever seen that show?! It's so good.) Maybe next time I'll choose strips that are a little wider and cut down on my work.

Block # 12: Kansas Dust Storm. Making the last block was quite exciting -- not only because it was the last block in the series but also because it involved a lot of thought (on my part) to get the colors arranged properly...I may or may not have accidently sewn an orange square to a blue square and had to unpick it...twice. Don Draper might have provided a distraction at the point though so who knows.

Linking this up to Sew Modern Monday