With a Little Help from Friends

Recently I got together with a group of women for a sew day. We meet monthly and I always teach a technique and we make a quilt for charity with the blocks we make. This month we played with HSTs.

The only information I gave them prior to getting together was to pull a gray and a turquoise from their stash to bring with them to the class. I chose these two colors purposely because they are always interpreted differently and I wanted to show how beautiful variations in color can be.

Many in the group have made HSTs in the past but none had used or even heard of the Magic 8 method. With a little marking, sewing and cutting, from two 12" squares, you can have 8 HST units very quickly. This tutorial on Craftsy does an excellent job explaining it.

I also wanted to bring my Bloc Loc ruler for them to try out and use. Some liked it immediately, others found it difficult to understand how it worked.

I think it is a brilliant tool and use it for trimming up all my HSTs.

Above is the quilt that was made with the squares made by the group.

I love how it just seems to glow.

For the quilting. I simply stitched a square spiral in each HST unit and traveled through to the next square. This made the quilting quick and continuous. The wonderful texture it gave the quilt was an extra bonus!

A turquoise and gray hexagon fabric from my stash was used for the backing and I bound it with an old piece of turquoise fabric from a bygone project. The quilt ended up being 40" square.

This sweet little quilt is now added to the growing stack of quilts being donated to Bags of Love as part of the 100 Quilts for Kids event hosted by Heather at Quilts in the Queue. A big thanks to my friends who helped get this one done so quickly (even though they worried a bit that their fabrics wouldn't all work together!)

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