I recently posted about the completion of my Craftsy BOM blocks (nope – I still haven’t decided on what to do about sashing). Well – I’ve finally taken a few hours to complete the blocks of two other quilt alongs and a personal project of mine for my 8 inch scrappy sampler.
First I’m going to break the blocks down into quilt alongs and then I’ll end by showing you what happens when you mix all 80 blocks together into one quilt!
Crumb Along – I only sort of followed this one and I made 8 ‘Crumb Blocks.’ I really enjoyed crumbing though and can definitely see myself doing more crumbing in future projects. 
The next blocks that I want to show you are from the Quilting Gallery’s Beginner’s Quilt Along. I took the 12.5” block tutorials they showed us and I made mine into 8.5” blocks – that’s why they’re a bit wonky. Much easier to ‘wonk’ them than it is to do the math from the 12 to 8 inch block pattern. You can also see that I may have made a few of the blocks too small so I added a ‘crumb’ border around them to get to size.
These are the set of blocks that started this craziness – from the Blogger’s BOM Quilt Along. 13 different quilters posted a tutorial once a month. It was a fun – no stress BOM to follow along with. 
These Mariner’s Compass Blocks were a personal challenge to myself. Last March, I took a short 1 hour Mariner’s Compass Lecture from quilter, Chris Lynn Kirsch. She was a great teacher and speaker. I bought her new book, ‘Compass Capers’ and went home and made my very first Mariner’s Compass. I wanted to do more than just one for this quilt so I also drafted a pattern for a circular compass and for the large four quarter compass with each quarter being an 8-inch finished block. I think they’ll make perfect added interest to my scrappy BOM quilt. 
When I saw that the New York Beautiy Quilt Along was making 8.5” blocks (just like the Blogger’s BOM) I knew that I was going to make a crazy, scrappy, sampler quilt. These are blocks I NEVER would have tried with out the push of the Quilt Along. I really enjoyed the paper piecing portion of these blocks. Not the hugest fan of the curved piecing end portion, but I definitely got better at that as my blocks continued. Plus – how cool do they look!? I even have my mother-in-law impressed by these – quite the feat I must say! 
Alright – the moment you’ve been waiting for! Here are all 80 blocks mostly haphazardly put together. I think when I put it together it will continue to be mostly random other than the New York Beauty Blocks and the Mariner’s Compass Quarter points. I have some ideas – some different type sashing may be involved. We’ll see what the quilt tells me it wants after it hangs out on my design wall for a few days.
I am hoping some people decide to limit themselves solely to scraps for ‘My Favorite Block Quilt Along’ next year as I have in this 8 inch sampler. I think the results are looking good. It may be too wild for some so you may want to pick one to three yards of other fabric to use consistently with your blocks and then use your scraps for different blocks. Just some thoughts…
Stay tuned…
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