Progress On the Retro '80s Building Blocks Quilt is Happening! Nanu Nanu!

Hello and Happy Tuesday!  It's been awhile since I've set any goals for my personal sewing projects, but I'm right on schedule with quilting commitments for clients and I'm SO close with my Retro '80s Building Blocks sampler...  See, I managed to assemble the "A" section of the quilt top last week, the part that I've outlined with a red rectangle: 

First Section Assembled, No Casualties Suffered By My Points

Woo hoo!  And then I assembled section "B" this morning.  This one was a lot faster since it was only three big blocks and no fiddling around with the little ones, but still very satisfying to have another chunk of the quilt top put together:

Second Section Assembled, Still No Catastrophes

This is slow going because I'm working out which way to press the seam allowances between the blocks as I go along and, total honesty -- I was procrastinating putting the blocks together once I'd finished them in case there was going to be a lot of seam ripping and swearing involved like there was when I was joining all the blocks together for my Sermon Scribbles quilt awhile ago.  I am a Side Presser and not an Open Seam presser.  When my seams are pressed in opposite directions and they nest and lock together at the seam intersections, that's when it's the easiest to get those seams to line up perfectly.  But without sashing between blocks and with so many different block styles in the quilt -- and without any pattern instructions telling me which way to press the seams to match up like that -- sometimes it works out and it's easy, and other times I have to match two seams that are pressed in the same direction and use that little hump-jumping tool to keep my presser foot level as it passes over the giant mountain of seam allowances!

And Now, Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming: Linda's Exquisite Traditional Quilts

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY to all of the mothers, grandmothers, sons of mothers, and daughters of mothers out there!  The last few quilts I've shared on the blog have been modern or contemporary in their fabrics and patchwork design, and I love those styles.  But I also adore really precise, well-executed traditional patchwork in timeless reproduction fabrics.  Fellow Charlotte Quilters' Guild member Linda Dassenko excels at traditional patchwork and I was delighted when she brought me two of her masterpieces for quilting.

Linda's Everyday Patchwork Sampler

Linda's 52 x 60 Everyday Patchwork Sampler

After seeing the Baptist Fan design I quilted on Cathy's quilt last year, Linda thought it might look good on her Everyday Patchwork Sampler and I wholeheartedly agreed.  While we often think of edge-to-edge quilting designs as only suitable for modern quilts, the Baptist Fan edge-to-edge design has been a staple of hand quilters for hundreds of years.  Originally, quilters would mark the Baptist Fan design on a quilt as they went along, using a string knotted at regular intervals and a pencil or piece of chalk, like a swing arm compass.  Each knot on the string corresponded with one fan arc.  This resulted in an allover quilting design that was fancier than just quilting along the patchwork seam lines, but still quick and easy enough to execute for utilitarian quilts.  Since the Baptist Fan design has been so popular throughout so much of the United States for hundreds of years, it's an excellent option for machine quilting traditional and reproduction quilt projects.

Ready For Her Close-Up: Look at Linda's Perfect Little Flying Geese Points!

Of course, I did not use knotted string or pencils to quilt the Baptist Fan design on Linda's sampler -- I resized the digital design to complement the scale of Linda's piecing and stitched it out with my computerized Bernina longarm machine.  I used So Fine 50 weight matte thread in color Mushroom (this post contains affiliate links) for the sampler quilt to minimize overstitched areas in the design and to ensure that the texture of the quilting design is what you notice, not the machine stitching.  The batting for this one is Quilters Dream 80/20 Cotton/Poly blend.