FW blocks trimmed and ready to sash

I had a busy day today trimming all the FW blocks and then cutting all the horizontal and vertical sashings for the top and bottom of the quilt and the bindings for the edges.

Here are the blocks all trimmed. Quite a few of them were a bit short of the 6½" square they were meant to be! Thank goodness that the sashings will cover those gaps!

And the bits I trimmed off:

Next I laid them on our bed on top of a piece of white fabric to decide on a layout. I used white because the sashings are going to be white so I wanted to see how the blocks would look with white between them.

Then I set to and cut out the sashings and bindings.

It's just occurred to me by looking at that photo that I haven't cut any green for the horizontal sashings on the back. I hope I have enough of the green left! Aaaaargh!

sunrise ~ sunset 9 July

Today's figures are:

dawn to dusk = 19 hours and 14 minutes (18 minutes less than last week)

sunrise to sunset = 17 hours and 17 minutes (13 minutes less than last week)

the quilting has begun - and ended!

I've been busy over the last few days quilting the FW blocks. First of all I couldn't decide how to quilt them - did I want them all the same design and, if so, what? It wasn't going to be easy to find something that would work on all the blocks as they're all different in the way they're made up. What I mean by that is - some are based on 3 x 3 blocks, some 4 x 4, some 5 x 5 and some aren't based on anything remotely like that so how was I going to find something that would suit them all?

I did contemplate doing spirals but decided it would be too much like hard work to get said spirals all looking the same so I abandoned that idea verrrrrry quickly! :oD

Then, it struck me. I just had to quilt whatever each individual block "told me". In other words, I just had to do whatever fitted with the block I was sewing at the time. I'm glad I did that because it made the quilting far less stressful.

Here are just a few. I had 5 colours of Gütermann Sulky variegated quilting threads in my threads boxes so I made good use of those.

I've actually quilted them all now - yay! - so next is the trimming to size. I can't quite make up my mind how I'm going to do that. Part of me says just use the overlocker to trim them down but, what if I do that and they're not all the same size? Maybe I should trim them all to the same size using a ruler and cutter and then overlock them to keep the edges together? Or trim them and sew around the edges with the sewing machine? Ach, I'll decide tomorrow! :o)

farmer's wife quilt - all the blocks done

Blocks sewn from the book "The Farmer's Wife Sampler Quilt"by Laurie Aaron Hird. Started February, 2012 and finished in July, 2012.