In The Hoop

Sandy's Civil War Sampler

 I was prompted to make this after attending the Point Bonita quilt retreat a couple years ago, where all six of my roomies had their CW sampler quilts on their beds, and all I had was a boring old Log Cabin. Theirs were from a block exchange (I sadly missed out on) and taken from the Civil War Love Letters/Diaries books.

 This started out as Barbara Brackman's Civil War block of the week, but shortly took a left turn as I started adding sampler blocks from other sources, and eliminating those I wasn't too crazy about. The Shoo-Fly blocks were supposed to be their own quilt, but ended up as setting blocks in this one.

  Barbara's instructions are for an 8" block. I drafted mine out to nine inches as that seemed to work better for me. The Shoo-Fly blocks are 6".

The reason you don't see any basting stitches or pins is because I already machine quilted it in the ditch, between the blocks.

My goal is to have this finished in time for our guild's 2014 Quilt Show in February. So far I've quilted 22 out of 59 blocks, and eight out of 24 border triangles. My hand quilting goes very slow these days, as I'm fighting tendon issues ~