Tumbling blocks and There's a Snail in Grandma's Flower Garden

It is a windy, icy, rainy, snowy, generally miserable day in southern Ontario. Forest Gumby is not at all pleased with this turn of events! We call him Forest Gumby because when running he looks like Forest Gump when the braces flew off his legs! The quilt in the background is another one of my favs and here's a close-up.

 

 

I made this tumbling block quilt at least ten years ago. I love scrap quilts and this one in particular. The rusty triangles pull the scraps together giving a unified look to the quilt. The border fabric was bought at Fabricland for $3 a metre and it was just stored away in the stash waiting for a quilt. I love the way it frames the quilt. I machine quilted the top with a stylized leaf and then the border was quilted using the design of the fabric as my guide.

The quilt looks complicated because of the Y seams but in actuality it is quite easy with a few helpful tips. The hexagons are made up of three diamonds with a Y seam where the diamonds meet. Two rusty triangles turn the hexagon into a large diamond. The large diamonds are sewn into rows and the rows were sewn together to make the top. Y seams can be daunting but I have developed a couple of tricks and a homemade tool that make these seams fast, easy, painless and perfect! I’m writing up a tutorial and hope to have it ready for posting this weekend or early next week.

Quilting Gallery’s Show and Share theme this week is “Dresdens, English paper piecing and hexagons”. I’ve entered There’s a Snail in Grandma’s Flower Garden. I wrote about it on April 5, 2013; there you can see the entire quilt and some close-ups including the snail. He’s in the first close-up in the lower right hand corner! Sneaky snail! There are lots of beautiful quilts entered. If you like mine I hope you’ll consider voting for it!

Time for a little beautification of me because it's Friday and I'm going out for dinner! So until I post again, happy sewing!