Holiday Spool Blocks for November

According to Brackman's Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Blocks, our November block was first published in 1906 in Clara Stone's Practical Needlework: Quilt Patterns as Fred's Spool. Ruby McKim referred to it as the Spool block in her 101 Patchwork Patterns which were published in 1920s-30s and reprinted by Dover in 1962 and, I think most quilters have long forgotten about Fred.

Kate made this pretty Spool block.

The traditional pattern was made from four trapezoid shapes with mitered corners, but an easier version uses squares and half square triangle units and a pattern can be found here: Grace's Spools

Pattern Notes

Note that the Grace's Spools pattern is for a very small quilt, made from 16 six-inch blocks. The cutting needed for a single block is:

Spool Fabric:

• Cut two 2-7/8" squares
• Cut three 2-1/2" squares

Background:

• Cut two 2-7/8" squares
• Cut two 2-1/2" squares

Trudi sent me these notes after making her blocks:

This was easy, I cut a 2 7/8 strip of each spool fabric from the short length of a FQ and that was all it took fabric wise, cut the 2 lg sqs and then trimmed for the 3 2 ½ sqs. I stacked the pieces and chain pieced them. Quick as anything! I used just shy of ¼ yd of red for all nine blocks.

Fabric Guidelines

Fabric choices this month will be HOLIDAY. Let's make Christmas-y blocks in November for a nice holiday gift for our winner(s). Please use any HOLIDAY fabric for the SPOOL fabric and RED fabrics (solids or tone-on-tone prints) for the BACKGROUND. You may use the same RED background for all your blocks, but all the SPOOL fabrics should be unique.

A little Inspiration

Thanks to the efforts of sneak peekers Ginny, Kate, Kristin, Terri and Trudi, here's an idea of how a selection of this month's blocks could play together.

Thanks, ladies, for providing the eye candy ;-)