February Small Quilt Challenge

If you are joining me in mid-stream, here's the small quilt scoop. Some of my followers are committed to having fun making a small quilt a month from some of my books this year. Just think, if you join us, you will have 12 little quilts made by the  end of the year.

January's project was the little Mourning Crosses quilt from Prairie Children & Their Quilts. This month, we are using the same book and making - a Broken Dishes quilt! This pattern has always been one of my favorites, ever since I saw this little antique Broken Dishes doll quilt in one of my favorite quilting history books, The American Quilt  by Roderick Kiracofe.

My version is a little different - I used lighter prints and added a red and white check border plus a blue inner border.  

So, if you decide to join in on this month's challenge, your options are to either make this little quilt on page 22 of my book or, using the same directions, skip the blue and make it in a smaller red and white for a Valentine's Day project -

If you carefully arrange your half-square triangles as you make your blocks, you will come up with a star motif in the center.

Yes, it's the same block as in the Prairie Children book. The redwork instructions for the center block can be found in the Files section of my yahoo group Small Quilt Talk. Either way you make it, it's a darling little project and No. 2 on the road to making 12 small quilts this year with me. 

This week - Week 1 - all you need to spend time doing is picking out your fabrics and cutting your pieces. Sewing them together will be next week's task. 

Skip ahead if you like, but make sure you leave time for quilting and finishing sometime this month before we begin another one for March. You don't want to end up with a bunch of unquilted tops, do you?? One down, only ELEVEN small quilts to go!

Have you seen the video Martingale & Co. created for this book when it first came out? Very sweet.

I am leaving tomorrow to teach at The Cabin Fever Quilt Retreat at the Grout Museum in Waterloo, Iowa, for a few days and so will not have time to start this quilt with you this week. Even though it's very simple, I love the little redwork design I made up and hope to get going on that after I come back. Have fun!