Starting the Maine quilt

Do you remember a post from August when I talked about my sun printing project in Maine? I had a great couple of days at our cottage on Sebec Lake sun printing about 9 yards of fabric. I got them out recently to figure out what I want to do with them. This is going to be my project for Country School monthly sewing retreat. But before our October sewing days I had to decide exactly what to do about it.

This will be an every-day quilt for our bed so I want it to be pretty quick and easy. I also don't want a lot of small pieces because that will hide the sun printed images. I worked up a couple of ideas and then did a Google search for "one block quilts" and saw all sorts of quilts that were square, triangle and hexagon based. Then I saw an apple core quilt.

I really did say "Ah Ha!" out loud.

Because I remembered that my friend made an apple core quilt with giant blocks. Here's was made with a huge variety of skull fabrics and it was a really cool quilt. Fortunately she still had the template. Can you see that this is a 12" block? Sadly, I don't think this particular template is available anymore but this one is close.

At the October sewing retreat I got the whole quilt cut out! It's pure luck that I happened to cut my fabric pieces to be larger than a fat quarter and I was able to cut 4 blocks from every fabric.

I couldn't wait to see how they will look together. Here's one of each fabric just randomly arranged on the floor. Sometime before the November retreat I'll lay the whole quilt out on the living room floor so that I can stack the rows for sewing. I love the mix of strong and subtle prints. This is going to be an awesome quilt.

Oh look! Leftovers! There's no way these are going in the trash. I see placemats and postcards in my future.