Piece & Quilt Sampler blocks for September

A little late, but here are my Piece & Quilt Sampler blocks for September. These blocks sewed up quickly and easily. I love the straight forward piecing of this sampler. The red, green and black color palette I’m using comes from the Starberry fabric collection by Corey Yoder for Moda Fabrics.

If you’re not familiar with the Piece & Quilt Sampler QAL, you can get all the details at Fat Quarter Shop. They are hosting this one, and we’re using the book, Celebrate with Quilts, by Susan Ache and Lissa Alexander. Each month they assign several blocks to make and by the end of February, 2025, you’ll have a beautiful quilt.

You can join the quilt along at any time. You’ll need the book which has all of the instructions and you can download the schedule here. Even if you’re not participating, you’ll enjoy looking at the beautiful blocks in today’s blog post.

A few piecing tips

I like to add a few piecing tips for those who are sewing along with us. Always start by pressing and starching your fabrics. This makes the entire piecing process easier and more accurate.

NOTE: I won’t be giving specific measurements or cutting instructions. You need to purchase the book, Celebrate With Quilts, to get the full instructions if you want to follow along.

Scrap Basket blocks

This month we made four Scrap Basket blocks. I love how they look when they’re sewn together. All those half square triangles look so pretty together!

Because there were eight HST’s in each colorway, I made them using the 8-at-a-time method. This is such a fast and efficient way to piece these. You can see the basic process of this method in the image below.

I also changed the way this block is assembled so that it cleaned up the base of the basket with fewer seams. I replaced one HST with a square and a square + HST with a 2 3/4″ x 5″ rectangle. I then added a slightly oversized triangle to the corner (5 1/2″ square cut in half diagonally). Then I trimmed the block to the perfect size.

Below, you can see the pressing from the back. This might be helpful if you’re someone who likes to nest seams like me.

Rosebud block

This block is really easy and straight forward. The large HST’s that make the center pinwheel are a nice opportunity to add a larger scale print as I did. There are another eight HST’s in this block as well, so I made them 8-at-a-time.

Broken Dishes block

The Broken Dishes block must have gotten its name from all of those diagonal seams. That’s just conjecture, but needless to say, some may not enjoy making this one as much as I do. I love diagonal seams.

The center square is perfect to fussy cut a favorite fabric. I made the square-in-a-square unit using Deb Tucker’s Square Squared ruler. This is a great ruler for making perfect units because the corner triangles are all oversized and the ruler makes it easy to trim each side.

The flying geese were made 4-at-a-time which is easy if you have my handy cutting chart. They’re also oversized so I can trim them perfectly to size.

All my blocks together

So far, I have the first two rows of the sampler quilt sewn together. It’s starting to look like a quilt! I’ll be using this upper quilt section to guide my fabric selections for each block as I go forward. This helps to keep the colors balanced throughout the quilt top.

If you’re someone who enjoys piecing and sampler quilts, you might want to put this project on your list. Either way, hopefully these tips were helpful. Have a wonderful day!