Quilt of the Month - Week 1

For those of you who are doing this small quilt challenge with me where we'll be making 12 quilts this year (# 1 - Crosses Mourning Quilt from Prairie  Children & Their Quilts this month), by the end of this weekend you should have at least picked out your fabric and perhaps cut out the pieces for the blocks.

These blocks can be made strictly from an assortment of your scraps. In making my quilt,  I chose nine different muted (but still colorful) prints. I used an assortment of light prints and shirtings for the backgrounds and 2 different black prints for each block, sometime repeating prints. If you don't have a lot of black to use, and you like the dark motif, how about indigo or dark brown? I think those would work just as well.

This beginning part shouldn't take long at all and if you're following along at my simple, no-pressure pace, you can stop now and work on piecing the blocks together next week. Here are some sample pieces for a block that took me all of 15 minutes to choose and cut. Follow the cutting directions in your book and do this 9 times for 9 blocks for the quilt in the book or 4 times if you're making the smaller version with 4 blocks. A couple of hours, at most.

I did not use red in my original quilt but I really like the way this looks.

Now put it aside and work on your other projects or go for a walk. Don't pressure yourself to finish it today. Don't worry, you'll get it done. You can get to it again next week when you have a little time. However, I would be very surprised if you stopped here, LOL. Sometimes small quilts are so much fun to make that it's very easy to just keep going until you finish the whole thing (like that bag of chips, but let's not go there . . . ) 

Small quilts do not require a lot of time but there is such a sense of satisfaction when you finish one. I know that disciplining yourself to get started is the hard part. We always have so much to do but, like exercise, if you don't carve out the time, it's just not gonna happen. If you just do a little at a time, every week, on a consistent basis, you'll finish this quilt by the end of this month and then we'll start another in February.  I'm pretty sure it's going to be a red & white Valentine's Day version of another one of my little quilts but I'm not telling which one yet.

Thanks for joining me!