Piece & Quilt Blocks for November

As you know, I’m participating in the Piece & Quilt Sampler QAL hosted by Fat Quarter Shop. We’re using the beautiful book, Celebrate With Quilts, which has all of the instructions to make this sampler quilt. You can find all of the quilt along details here.

Let’s take a look at the Piece & Quilt Sampler blocks that were assigned for November. As always, I have a few tips to share that I found while making my blocks.

Remember, 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.

Aircraft blocks

We’re making four Aircraft blocks this month. This block is very similar to the Cat’s Cradle block. I did a full tutorial (here) on this block earlier this year (it includes a free pattern for the block). The Aircraft block contains three Cat’s Cradle units and one HST unit.

When you put four blocks together, you get a beautiful and interesting larger block. Because of the fabric color and placement, the center becomes an hourglass block inside a square.

Feel free to play with the layout of this one. I rotated all of the blocks so that the red and white HST units landed in the corners. I liked this layout, too, but chose to stick with the original plan.

My tips for this block would be to oversize the small and large triangles of each unit so you can trim them down perfectly. I don’t have pictures of this, but you can see how I make and trim this type of block here.

Eight Hands Around Block

This block is made up of flying geese units and HST’s. You can really change the look here by the color placement of fabric. I wanted to increase the visibility of the larger star points, so I made sure there was contrast between the HST fabric that bordered it.

I’m really happy with the way this block turned out. My tip would be to oversize the flying geese units so you can trim them perfectly. Same goes for the HST units.

Purrr-fect Helper(s)

The day I was taking pictures of my blocks, my “grand kitties” came to visit. Like all cats, they love to help when there is fabric involved. Frannie and Phoebie are sisters and they are gorgeous cats! (And they compliment the Starberry fabric I’m using for my sampler blocks.)

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We are nearing the end of the quilt along and only have three more blocks to go! Then we’ll put them all together and add borders. Always the best part!

Have a wonderful day and thanks for reading!