breaking in the quilting room

Yesterday I started a new quilt! Boxes are just about unpacked in the rest of the house, so it seemed ok to allow myself to start my first big project. In lieu of sewing or knitting while we've been packed up these last couple months I've been watching oh so many YouTube tutorials and looking at Pinterest projects. Always fun.

I've had my collection of Indie fabrics for quite some time. I even already made a quilt from them as a wedding gift for my cousin. BUT I really got them for myself because I like them so much. So I decided to pull out the stack again and see what I could make for our new place with what I had leftover. With the tutorials in mind, I landed on a churn dash block made from 5" blocks. These were so quick to make (I used Missouri Star Quilt Co's method) and I had a lot of fun pairing fabrics. I especially like the way this blue and orange block turned out.

Before I started, I separated the prints into 'cool' and 'warm' piles and made the center and rectangles from one of each. I chose the coolness or warmness of the coordinating solid to match the center square. It's not really that noticeable because the prints are so many colors, but I do think that little bit of planning makes the overall look somewhat scrappier than doing a lot of color matching would have done. 

I have myself a set of 12 blocks that will be about 12 inches finished and now I will play around with them to see how I want them arranged into a small quilt. My one piece of advice? Trim everything square before final assembly of the blocks! I tried to wing it on my first two blocks and they turned out ok but were tougher to line up seams along the way than the ones where I actually took the time to trim the HSTs. My inner lazy girl tried to resist but she lost out. Trim the things.