350 Blocks Project: Starting a New Year
Shelly is kindly hosting the 350 blocks project again this year. The goal is to make 350 quilt blocks in 2017. It's a lot of fun to join in and keep track of the things I make. If you are interested, the 350 Blocks button below will take you to the project page.
Since I never did my final report for last year, I'll start with that. After being behind all year, I actually managed to exceed 350 blocks!
I was secretly working all year on a Christmas quilt to surprise my husband. I'm thrilled to say that I pulled it off! He had no idea what I had been up to, and he hadn't even seen any of the fabrics. I made 50 blocks for this quilt. 42 of them are on the front, and I used the rest on the back.
Since I had some fabric left over, I also made 30 four-patches to play with the extra blocks on the quilt back. I love the simplicity and symmetry of this one.
I'm also a fan of leaders and enders. I made this table runner entirely with the leader/ender method. If you haven't heard of it, check out Bonnie Hunter's post here. There are 40 hourglass blocks in this table runner.
All together, that gives me 120 blocks that have yet to be counted. And my grand total for 2016 is... 386 blocks! I really wasn't sure that I was going to make it to 350 last year. I'm excited that I exceeded the goal.
Now that it's February, it's already time for me to start counting this year's blocks. Fortunately, I'm doing well so far. January saw me putting together all of my units for Bonnie Hunter's En Provence mystery. I made my quilt smaller and I tweaked the layout, so my blocks don't match up with hers.
I made 9 main blocks:
A total of 12 sashing blocks in 4 styles:
4 cornerstone blocks:
And 12 edge blocks to finish the design around the outside of the quilt. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of those, but I do have a picture of the whole quilt! It's currently quilted and waiting for binding.
As you may know, I'm a big fan of using up my scraps on the back of the quilt. This time, I have 6 more blocks hiding out on the back.
That gives me 43 blocks in January. It feels good to be starting out the year ahead of the curve! Hopefully I can stay on track this month.