Recently when I was up visiting my son-in-law who is a fabric sales rep he let me cherry pick through his bin of samples so that I could make some sample quilts for an upcoming sales event and I came across a line from Free Spirit that was called Moondance, it was pretty subdued compared to the Kaffe fabrics that I have currently been sewing on and I kind of liked the calm and peaceful feel of the little prints and soft colors. They kind of reminded me of little pj prints or blouse prints from a few years back. Any way I decided to do something pretty simple and used some 7 inch Hoffman Batik squares that he also gave me and combined them with the prints. At first I was just going to add 3 inch strips all around and make a simple 12 inch block but that looked pretty boring and predictable so I decided to cut these 12 inch squares into 6 inch squares and that's how I came up with the sort of random looking quilt. I actually don't do random well as I have to "control" where colors end up so this is my solution for controlling random.
INSTRUCTIONS
The first step is to cut 7 inch squares (in this case these were pre-cut squares from Hoffman) but I also cut 7 inch squares of the print as well.
Then cut 4 strips per 7 inch square that are 3 inches wide and at least 13 inches long. (or one 14 inch strip that can be divided for first two sides and two 13 inch strips for the remaining sides.Sew two strips to the 7 in square on opposite sides and press. Add the next two strips and press....trim edges to make a perfect 12 inch square.
Take the 12 inch square and cut the square in 1/2 and 1/2 again so that you have 4 six inch squares. Then you can arrange these 4 squares to form 2 patterns which can be repeated in random colorways.
These are the examples of the two different arrangements I used and I just alternated them and mixed the colors up so that hopefully there was a balance of prints around the quilt.
The Quilt is 5 blocks across and 6 blocks down and if you use this size then you would need an even number of the two styles of blocks. I'm sure it would be equally interesting to configure the blocks in other ways and do a random selection......it's all about you creating what ever look pleases you. No rules allowed here.
When our children were small we were up skiing and my husband and I were standing on the porch of the lodge waiting for the girls to finish their ski lessons and a group of kids were having a wonderful snowball fight and just having a ball when a rather stern lady who I guess was one of the chaparones of the group came up and started clapping her hands and hollering at the kids....."Children, Children....lets ORGANIZE this snowball fight!" Well my husband and I had to turn away because we thought that was about one of the funniest things we had ever heard anyone say and to this day when ever one of us starts to over organize or over think a situation the other will say ..."lets organize this snowball fight." I have a tendency to want to over think my quilts and as I've said random is very hard for me so I need to remember the snowball fight, don't we all.
