Friday, February 01, 2008

In the comments May Britt asked about the pattern for the Night and Noon. It's from a McCalls magazine that I bought in 1974, and the instructions were somewhat sketchy and the dimensions diabolical. I haven't yet found a site with instructions on the net, but it's easy enough to draft for hand piecing. If I have time I will rough out some rotary cutting instructions, because it's quite an easy block to make. I like mine better than the one in the magazine.

Kathie from Inspired By Antique Quilts wanted to know if it was hard to do starts and stops in the quilting; the Statler has an auto tie off feature that makes it easy. All we have to do is clip the thread ends later. If I were doing an heirloom quilt I would turn that feature off and end the threads by knotting them and threading them into the batting with a needle. And that would be labour intensive, but it gives a nice result.

Karen from Karen's Chronicles asked about the pattern for this quilt;I made this up myself sometime last year, though it may well have been invented before this; it's difficult to come up with anything truly original when we're all playing with the same basic shapes.

It's super simple; make a heap of Rail Fence blocks, with any size strips you want. I made this sample with 2" strips, and so was the quilt. Piece three strips together, lightest in the middle and darker either side. I didn't really use any lights in the quilt, as the setting was light fabrics.
Cut the strip into squares; mine were 5" squares because that's how wide the pieced strip turned out. Cut squares of setting fabric the same size and draw a diagonal line in one direction.
Layer a fabic square on top of a pieced square and sew 1/4" away from both sides of the diagonal line. Make sure you have all the diagonals sloping in the same direction; this block is a pinwheel of sorts, and it can be made to spin in opposite directions and then the pieces won't all go together.
Cut on the drawn line to give two pieced HSTs.
For every two units you can make a block like this;or use a lot of different parts to make random blocks like in my quilt.

The blocks turn out to be 8" finished, which is a nice size. You can make these with any size strips and any number of strips.

4 comments:

  1. the rail fence blocks cut up like this are really quite pretty. I can imagine doing string blocks this way too :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. thanks!
    I was curious about that.
    Kathie

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thankyou for the tutorial. Very easy looking, but so effective.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Oh that night and noon is really cool!

    ReplyDelete