Off to a Less Than Perfect Start!

I am back from Hawaii and I have started my Farmer’s Wife Sampler quilt. The first thing I did was print out all of the templates. I really hate templates, but if I am going to fussy-cut the border fabric as I intend, I will need to use some of them. I am trying to rotary cut the pieces, but that only works for certain shapes such as squares and half-square triangles.

Next, I moved onto fabric selection. I have decided to use a Jinny Beyer border fabric as my central motif and to select all of the fabrics in the palette from the border fabric. So, I pulled 8 border prints from my stash and asked my Facebook friends to vote on them:

Jinny Beyer Border Fabrics

Ultimately, fabric 8 was the most popular. So, I decided to pair it with fabric 5 and use them both. They look really good together. (hint – click on the image if you want it to display larger on your screen)

Next, I picked the rest of the palette. I ended up with 24 fabrics! You can never have too many fabrics in a quilt:

Palette for Val's Farmer's Wife Sampler Quilt

Finally, I made my first block. And…unfortunately, I cannot get the seam allowances to line up. I ripped out a few pieces and resewed them. That helped, but ultimately, something is wrong here.

I have sent a post to the Yahoo! group and  I hope someone can set me straight. Straight, get it? ha ha.

In the meantime, I think I’ll move on to another block.