Project Quilting 16.3: Common Blocks

It's hard to believe that we are already halfway through the Project Quilting challenges for the year.  Last year was my first year participating and I didn't really know what to expect.  This year I had more of a simple plan for myself: a list of small quilted items I wanted to make and the goal of using up full fabric scraps.  I've been doing pretty well with both of these!

I made these cupcakes over a decade ago and they were very heavy played with.

I'm so impressed that I found all six of them and that they are still in good shape!

When I saw that the Project Quilting Challenge 16.3 was "common blocks" several things immediately came to mind.  First, I would definitely be making a churn dash block (my favorite!).  Second, it should be a two-color quilt.  I've never done a true two-color quilt with only two fabrics and, well, as you can see, I still haven't.  Red and white or blue and white are the two most common two-color quilts, but  I've already used red in a challenge this year, so I decided to go with this green star print because it's mostly non-directional. 

Finally, this would be the perfect challenge to make the new oversized potholder I kept dreaming about.  The Iowa potholder in the photo above is so old I didn't know to make the back fabric larger than the front fabric when free-motion quilting.  I may have also done the quilting with my regular piecing foot because I didn't know a FMQ foot existed.  Despite these set-backs, it's still a perfectly functional potholder, although the binding is starting to fray at the edges from regular usage over the years.

I picked up this 1000 Great Quilt Blocks book in a used book store when I first started quilting.  I originally planned on rolling the dice to randomly pick three other blocks to go with my churn dash, but I quickly realized that not all of the blocks in the book lend themselves well to being made as a 6" block and not all the blocks are what I would consider common - there are pictorial blocks and letter blocks and non-square blocks.  So instead, I flipped through and just picked three other ones that worked for me.

I decided to experiment a little bit and use a layer of Insul-Bright between two layers of regular batting to make this potholder super-insulating.  I think this is actually overkill and too much.  It also made my FMQ foot jump and skip stitches over some of the seams so I wouldn't do this again unless I was planning on doing a straight stitch only.  If this had been a display piece I would have picked out the thread and fixed the jumps, but since it is a utility piece I just backstitched over the skips and it's fine.  A little messy, but I'll just slop food over the edge onto anything that bugs me. 

And that is it for this fun little project!  I'm off to bake something- the size of this potholder is perfect for cookie sheets.  I'm linking up my successful finish at the Project Quilting link party!

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A little housekeeping: If you have been following my blog and social media, you may think that this is all I have been sewing, but this is actually my fifth finish of the year.  I'll be sharing one of my secret sewing projects next week and I'm currently hand-binding my Fado Road quilt so there will be some non-PQ content soon.  And, as long as I'm on this tangent, if you enjoy seeing what I sew, please consider signing up for my BluePip Designs newsletter.  I send out quarterly newsletters plus bonus coupon savings (this link will take you to my most recent newsletter, which includes a bit of Tula Pink destash and a coupon code) when I release new patterns and it's a way to make sure you see what I want to share with it (as opposed to the algorithms which seem to be hiding most of my posts lately).