New Project - One Block Wonder? — One Quilting Circle

So this past weekend, I went on a Quilter’s Retreat. It was needed, and I spent much time deciding what to pack, what not to pack, and what to work on while I was there. With roughly 3 plus days of non-stop sewing, THE LIST came together fairly quickly, and that allowed me to edit what I was bringing. The project list all boiled down to piecing projects, which meant that it was easy to plan things out. For the record, I had one case for my clothes, my Tuto case for the machine, and my Poppins bag for projects. I have gotten better at this.

The first project I wanted to make some headway on is my 2023 Ovarian Cancer Auction quilt, which I partner with Cheryl Szynkowski on. ( I design and piece it, she quilts it, I bind it and we jointly enter it). Cheryl’s quilting calendar has gotten very busy this year, and so I want to give her as much time as she needs in order to fit this into her schedule. This is auctioned off through MD Anderson Cancer research center in Houston, and typically, they want the quilts there in June…so while we’re not in a time crunch, it’s time to get going on this.

Cheryl and I have discussed some ideas for this, and we are in agreement that this year, the quilt design will have a horizontal orientation (for a change), and it’ll be a wall hanging sized quilts. In the past, we’ve done full size bed quilts. Typically, the other quilts in the Auction are wallhanging sized.

Late last spring, I was shopping on Quilters Classifieds on Facebook one night (as one does). I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just mindlessly scrolling…until 6 yards of THIS came up for sale. I thought, and then I almost hit the buy button - but decided to sleep on it. This fabric is called Dynasty by Chong -A Hwang of Timeless Treasures. I am a hardcore fan of much of her work, and I look at it and see Teal. There’s a lot of other colors in there, but there’s definitely teal. So what do you decided to do with that?

I also have in the project bin several yards of color gradation fabrics in both purple and teal - which will give Cheryl plenty of negative space on which to play. The final design has a teal band going across the top, a band of One Block Wonder (Kaleidoscope blocks) going across the center, and a band of the purple gradation on the bottome. It’s going up on the design wall sometime this weekend for playtime, but in the meantime…I had to take a deep breath and figure out how to cut the fabric before I left.

I’ve come across the Kaleidoscope technique, aka the One Block Wonder technique, before in my travels. It terrified me, and the project was abandoned before I finished it…so I had a lot of research to do. I was off to You Tube, where there are several really good tutorials to watch on the technique. My favorite one was done by Donna Jordan of Jordan Fabrics. Donna has many easy to follow tutorials - on many patterns and techniques.

The one she did on Kaleidoscopes was easy for me to follow and to adapt. I didn’t use her pattern, but by following what she did with the 24 inch repeat, I was able to layer my project correctly, and to create the 6 identical triangles for each of the pieces. She also did a great job explaining what kind of a fabric would work well for this technique, and which would not.

This kind of precise cutting is best (if you’re me) done before you leave for retreat, and when you have the sewing space to yourself. I don’t think I would have attempted to do the cutting on a retreat. I can also attest that my 5 lb dumbbell was put to very good use for this.