Hooray! A Sewing Weekend!

Every so often my friend Terry Wojciehowski and I get together for a sewing weekend.  Earlier this year, we were meeting once a month, taking turns at each other's houses, but then life got hectic and we got off track.  So this weekend was a treat!

I've been getting some of the Strip Club kits from Cozy Quilt Shop in El Cajon CA.  Every month, Daniela Stout, owner of Cozy, designs a quilt using 2-1/2" strips and crowds of women come into the store on the second Saturday to see the new pattern (I believe they get the pattern for free if they come to the shop for the Strip Club gathering), and to buy the strips and additional fabrics, if desired, to make the quilt.  I taught at Cozy Quilts in March and liked the current month's pattern a lot!

The name of this pattern was "Shine" and, as you can see from the color illustration, the strip set was very bright, multicolored and fun!  I purchased the strip sets and the pattern, deciding to pull the white background fabric from my stash and to decide on border fabrics after I made the blocks.

The black and white drawing illustrates how Daniela constructed her blocks, moving outward from light strips to darker strips to give a "radiating" effect to the quilt.  Also, looking at the black and white chart made it easier for me to understand that these stars are actually formed by 4 blocks coming together, with 1/4 of a star in each block..

The way the star blocks are constructed is to make the blocks as shown above and then use Sharyn Craig's Cutting Corners ruler to cut diagonally across the large white square and then replace the triangle that is cut away with the pieced star quarter.  It took me all of Saturday and some of Sunday to piece all the blocks.

Some setting triangles were also needed; those will also get "star parts" sewn onto them.

It took a while to get all the star parts done.  The unit starts with flying geese, then background and star fabric triangles get added on.

I needed a LOT of them!



Some of the blocks don't get star parts, so I needed to do a preliminary block layout to determine which ones.  This was a picture I took early this morning; you can see that I added some pink fabrics to piece some of the setting triangles.

These are the border fabrics that I think I'm going to use.  There are so many bright fabrics in this quilt and I wanted a fabric that would be playful and fun to go with them.  And stripes make such great inner borders that I think I'll be happy with these. And it doesn't hurt that it has a lot of PINK!

Unfortunately, this is as far as I got on our sewing weekend, but it's a really good start on this quilt.

If you are in the San Diego area, CozyQuilt Shop is located at 2940 Jamacha Rd., Suite H., El Cajon CA 92019 (phone: 619-670-1516).  There are many Strip Club patterns as well as patterns for fat quarters and lots of other fun things; you can see all that by clicking here.