Modern Reclaimed

Remember the fickle quilter blocks that I worked on a few weeks ago?  I wrote about them here.  I set a few "rules," which I called a recipe and tried to stick to them, especially on this particular top because I wanted to see if I could, indeed, make them work.

The Recipe 

• 2 or more UFO projects
• 2-3 yards of solid for background
• fat quarters that coordinate with the UFO's

Ah, they did!  I started with pieces from two different projects: one was the Louisiana Bayou Quilt that eventually went to my son and dil: Rory and Meggan.  The second was from a project that I'd started and didn't finish.  The 2 and 1/2 inch strips worked really well with the left-over log cabin block.


I dug through the stash of red fabrics and found a bit of the red that's in the center of the log cabin and ripped apart some of the strips that were sewn, and I was ready to go!

For starters, I cut the log cabin block into four uneven pieces by cutting through the red center on angles.

The next step was to add some wide strips to the new pieces and then--the hard part--squaring up the block.  Since I have this great ruler (EZ Quilting Square Ruler by Marti Michell), I thought I'd put it to good use first squaring up the log cabin edges. 

 Then turning the block and squaring up the background sides.

It worked very well, so I did the same thing with the other three blocks.  On some of the blocks I added a large piece of background fabric.

Then I got creative and made a plus block using some of the other fabrics.  The more I played the more I liked what I had.  I've been reading Quilting Modern by Jacquie Gering and Katie Pedersen, and used a couple of their ideas for blocks so that I ended up with a sampler-like project.

I also happened to attend my guild's August meeting and thoroughly enjoyed the quick lesson on making flying geese blocks.  I used one of the techniques to make three geese and that gave me another block.  

Then I arranged, moved, turned and twisted blocks until, finally, I was satisfied.  Of course, I needed to fill in some of the open spaces with background fabric, but that was easy enough.

Although I didn't use up as much of the UFO blocks as I'd hoped, in the end I really like the top.  It was so much fun to play as I went along and to use everything I learned while learning it.  Can you see using this idea?  I hope so because it was a blast for me. I hope it looks great once it's quilted.  I have to wait a bit before quilting it, though.