Jen's Quilts

I'd had a pack of 12 coordinating fat quarters (picked up on sale at the usual big place) sitting in the stash for a while.  I had no idea what to do with them until I saw a pattern in the Quilters Companion magazine (forget which issue now).  It used 12 yellow and black fat quarters arranged in plus  shapes.   Wanting an easy-ish project, I went ahead and cut up the fat quarters into squares, and then started arranging on the floor in the dining room.  I decided to put the quilt top together on the antique Singer, and I could set the machine up there for the duration.  I started by following the design of the original pattern, which used partial plus  blocks to fill in the gaps between complete blocks.  But that left me with plenty unused pieces.  So I decided change up the pattern and use as many full plus  blocks as I had available fabric.  The gaps around the edge would then need to be filled in with something else. An...

  A while back grandma gave me some blocks that Aunt Blanche had put together at some point.  I had no idea what to do with them.  There wasn't enough to make a quilt from, so I thought about a table runner.  That didn't seem to work either so there they sat for a very long time. I pulled them out again earlier this year, probably after watching too many Youtube quilt videos, and decided to use the free version of PreQuilt to help me figure out what to do with the blocks.  After some messing around I came up with a layout that made a small lap size quilt.  The layout used the nine similar blocks and a lot of negative space.  And I had just the right Liberty fabric I'd picked up from the usual place when they were having a sale.  With so few pieces, this was the quickest and lightest quilt I had put together in a while.  So I took the opportunity to piece it on the antique Singer. There were three other blocks in the collection, but they were...

I watch a fair few quilting videos on YouTube.  A couple of years ago I found Carol Thelen, who was releasing a video a day of a different block .  I very much enjoyed these videos, and seeing all the different blocks she was making, and providing free patterns for.  For some blocks, Carol showed what they would look like as a whole quilt.  And when I saw the delectable mountains block and quilt , I knew that was the pattern to use for a layer cake I had laying around. The Benartex layer cake had been sitting in the stash for a few years, maybe since one of mum's trips to the US?  I didn't want a plain background (though it does sort of look like it in the photos), so I ended up purchasing three different low volume fabrics in white from the usual big shop. After one of my last quilts which had a few hundred small half square triangles, it was quite nice to work with a much larger half triangle size.  These were then trimmed, cut into rectangles and rearr...