A new start

 It seems that whenever I finish a quilt, I almost immediately start a new one.  Yesterday my neighbor (he's definitely not a quilter!) was surprised to know I usually have about 10 quilts going at once.  And they are all on the "slow go," but they do get finished eventually.   I think I counted 16 finished so far this year, quite a record for me.

This year one of my local quilt guilds isn't meeting until at least January, if not later.  I volunteered to coordinate a block of the month raffle as well as a block swap for the year.  For the raffle, I will come up with a 6-9" block pattern and draw a name each month for people to mail their finished blocks to.   I thought I'd start with a nine patch for the first block and make the blocks a little more difficult each month.  People can also make a block to keep for a sampler.

For the block swap, I ran a poll first and a slight majority wanted to make Bonnie Hunter's Scrappy Trips Around the World block.  It's 12" finished and is a nice stash buster because it's made with just six 16" x 2.5" strips.  I have a lot of leftover binding pieces that I cut up yesterday to get started.  I wanted to make a sample for people to see, and I noted that a single block isn't all that pretty.   I am learning that, with scrappy quilts, you need lots of variety and color to make them work.  

I hope people in the group (10-12 of us are making two blocks for each person) will persist through this swap.  They have all year to make their blocks and then we'll swap either in person or some other way in May.  This past June we all met in the classroom at our local quilt shop, all wearing masks, and swapped our blocks out.   It was good to see everyone, even though it was a very quick session.  We'll just have to wait and see, as with so many activities these days.