Tag: Contrary Wife quilt block

Turkey Tracks: Acadia Quilt

Turkey Tracks:   May 12, 2014

Acadia Quilt

 

“Acadia” started as a leader/ender project–pioneered by Bonnie Hunter who now has TWO books of her own leader/ender projects.  (Basically, you keep a pile of blocks near your machine while working on another quilt, and when you need to cut the thread on the primary quilt, you run through a “leader/ender” block instead.)

AND, I ve long had a yearning to make a red and green quilt.

This quilt is BIG, heavy, warm, and I absolutely love the way it came out.  It’s built on the “Contrary Wife” quilt block, but I split some of the larger blocks into four-patches.

(My rug is out to be cleaned–hence the dark pad on the floor.)

100_3901

 

I love the way the secondary pattern developed in this quilt–forming not only a trellis, of course, but squares inside the light squared an inside the trellis center with dark and light centers:

100_3904

 

 

100_3902

Here’s a corner and the inner and outer borders:

100_3903

The back was really fun because I did not have enough of the wild green Kaffe Fasset floral I used on the back, so I used more of the bright red remnants I had and every orphan block I could find that would work in this quilt:

100_3910 100_3909 100_3908

Here’s the backing turned to the front, and you can see the bright green binding:

100_3905

 

I used a Kelly green thread and a pantograph entitled “Arcadia” from Urban Elementz.  It has nice gentle curves and just the right amount of coverage for this quilt.

100_3911

But this quilt is “Acadia”–no “r” added–after the famous national park just north of Camden, Maine.

Turkey Tracks: The Red and Green Quilt Is Taking Shape

Turkey Tracks:  March 25, 2014

The Red and Green Quilt Is Taking Shape

 

Looky, looky:

IMG_0220

 

I’m loving the interesting secondary patterns that are forming.

This quilt started as a “leader/ender” project–an idea pioneered by Bonnie Hunter as a method to work on two quilts at once.  Basically, when you get to a point while sewing where you might cut your thread, you feed a “leader/ender” block through the machine instead.  So, for some time I sewed together dark and light green half-square triangles cut from my 3 1/2-inch strips–until I had sooooo many of them.  Then I fed through four-patches of light and dark reds and greens from the two-inch strips. This quilt is being made entirely from my stash that I cut up this summer.

The block is a “Contrary Wife” block–and was inspired by Bonnie Hunter’s “Blue Ridge Beauty” quilt, which I made in green shades last year.  (It remains one of my very favorite quilts in the whole world.)  I think I had a lot of light/dark green half-square triangles started so just continued to make this quilt.  I’ve wanted to make a red/green quilt for some time.

IMG_0223

 

You MUST have the light square in the upper left corner when you put this block together for the light and dark rows to line up within the lattice pattern.

I’ll do some borders, of course.  Probably a dark red thin border at first–and maybe a wider bright red border next.  Who knows?  The fabrics will come out of my stash.