Blocks of the Month for January

Last year, I was inspired by the Quilt Matters Colour My World Challenge to sew a series of coloured quilt blocks using a new improvisational technique each month. By the end of the year, I had 12 pleasingly wonky blocks to work with, and a plan to turn them into a bedspread for our guest room.

For this project, I actually need 24 blocks, so each month I'll be making a companion block to one of the colour challenge blocks, and quilting both with designs from Leah Day's online class Free Motion Quilting a Sampler.

There are a lot of great sources of inspiration for this project. It will be hard to pick just 12 designs! I'll be making my favourite blocks from the Pile O'Fabric Skill Builder Block of the Month, The Cute Life's Try Something New sampler series, and the Craftsy 2012 Block of the Month.

The first block I made is the Pile O'Fabric Sound Wave block. I'm really pleased with this one!

It goes with my improvised red block from last January, to which I've added sashing of the same colour.

October's grey block got the same treatment.

The companion for my grey block is based on Amy Gibson's slashed block from 2012 Craftsy BOM. As you may know, I'm terrible at following pattern directions. Modifying things to see what will happen always seems more interesting than just making them. In this case, it didn't occur to me until late in the process that varying the width of the slash strips would prevent them from lining up when I sewed the pieces back together. Oh well. The result is slightly wonky looking, but considering the nature of this quilt, I'm happy with that.

The plan was to construct one block every month, and quilt two, but I'm out of batting and it's been too cold to think of going out to get more. Until that situation is resolved, I'll be using the time to get ahead in companion block construction.