My dearest friend has entered the world of quilting recently.  I was wistfully thinking one day how much fun it would be to do a quilt along with her, despite the miles separating us.  The VERY NEXT DAY, I received a text from her asking if I would like to join her in the Fat Quarters Shop’s Crossroads Quilt Along.  Friends for life, no doubt about it.

There are kits to purchase if you like, I have found the Strawberry Fields Revisted from Moda quite pretty and not something I would have chosen for myself.  Kimberly Jolly is quite generous with the fabric in the kits, and I found there is plenty left over for mistakes.  The patterns are released monthly on the blog with a link to donate $5 per pattern to the March of Dimes.  Fat Quarters and Moda have teamed up to match $10,000  in donations.  Please consider to this wonderful cause even if you do not join the quilt along.

In January my kit arrived with cutting instructions and the instructions to make the first block, the House block.

Pretty, aren’t they?  The unfinished block is 8″, so I cut a frame with an inside dimension of 7.5″ to get a good look at the finished block.  It was easily cut out of an old manila folder.

 

All my pieces have been cut and organized in baggies.

And another bag to catch all the ‘crumb’ pieces.  I have plans for these.

March’s block is the Diamond pattern.  We started with half square triangles that I daisy chained.

Here they are all hanging out together.

I just flipped them over and sewed on the other side of the line.

I then cut on the line and got them together to iron them open.

 

At this point I realized that I sewed them WRONG SIDES TOGETHER!!!  I let out a sigh, turned my machine off, and left the craft room for a bit.

When I returned I spent quite a while ripping seams out and re-stitching.  Only two blocks had to be remade totally, the rest were salvageable.

The best piece of advice I can give for this quilt along is to measure after each step.  The directions are great and give you the expected measurements.

There were plenty of crumbs left over for my stash.

Okay…I need help here… This drives me insane when it happens.  Anyone have any tips or tricks to prevent this?  Please leave the advice in the comment section.

Here are all my diamonds ready to be put together.

I hate losing corners, so I was very careful when sewing these rows together.

There they are, all nice and pointy.

And one finished square.

 

For some reason my other two blocks did not measure up to 8″.  My husband heard me complaining to myself and came into my room to tell me that 1 out of 3 is a great night for a baseball player.  Then he finished reloading his nerf guns and ran off to put the kids to bed.

I’ll post pictures of the other two once I fix them.