Friday 24 March 2023

Dear Jen revisited

On Sunday I went digging in my quilting cupboard to find a WIP I wanted to work on.  But before I could find that WIP, I came across my Dear Jen blocks from the quilt along in 2019.  

Jen Kingwell ran the Dear Jen programme and she issued patterns for 6" hand pieced or hand appliqued blocks each week or month.  The blocks were very intricate and making my own templates for every block added to time each block took too.  



In a sign of how my thinking has changed, I went from, "I'll make some more of those one day", straight to, "Why don't I just sew these blocks together and call it quits". 

So I laid out my measly 11 hand pieced blocks and thought about what I could do with them.  Two of them needed a bit of fixing up, so I was a radical and just threw them in the bin!!!

Then I was left with 9 blocks which is a good number for a quilt, so I set to and hand sewed them together while I watched the tennis from Indian Wells.  


A few days later I went searching in my stash for some borders to make my mini quilt a bit bigger.  I must have tried about 20 fabrics before I settled on my final choices, but I'm very happy with them. The orange really works.  

The whole quilt is 30" x 30", so I looked for a yard/metre of fabric in my stash and found In a Finch by Tula Pink:


 

Then I pulled out my Jacqui Gering Walk books 1 and 2 and made a short list of possible machine quilting designs.  In the end I chose the above design which works really well because the quilt is square.  

I'll be sure to show you the finished quilt once I get the binding on.  


Now it's time for the Peacock Party.  Feel free to link up a recent blog post below:




You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

5 comments:

Gretchen Weaver said...

I've made several small quilts lately, so much fun to make something small. Good for you to have the strength to throw away some blocks! Happy stitching!

Alycia~Quiltygirl said...

Brilliant finish!! and doesn't it feel just so good to get those blocks into usable form!!! Go you!!!

Jocelyn is Canadian Needle Nana said...

So much beautiful colour and fabric in these blocks. How wonderful to get them into their own gorgeous quilt. So in love with that bird fabric.

FlourishingPalms said...

So good! I love knowing that you were looking for one thing, found another, and tackled finishing a WIP. That's just great. You've done a nice job with this - all that detailed piecing looks very intricate - and I'm happy for you to have one less in your to-do pile.

Mystic Quilter said...

At 6" I'm not surprised you stopped at nine. They look good with your fabric choice for the border and the Tula fabrics beautiful, I bought a piece of this one when it came into the shops;