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 ;-)

Floral Cactus Pots in May

April showers bring May flowers . . . so for the month of May, we'll be making scrappy Cactus Pot blocks using at least one floral fabric. Kathie made this block.

Our 6 inch block pattern: Cactus Pot Quilt Block Pattern.

This quilt block design was first published as Cactus Pot in the Oklahoma Farmer Stockman, on January 1, 1930. It appeared in a monthly column that was part of that publication in the 20's and 30's called Good Cheer Quilt Patterns.

In May, we'll be going almost completely scrappy, with only a couple rules for fabric selection:

1. NO WHITES (solids or WOWs), NO CREAMS, and NO BLACKS (solids or BOBs). You MAY use fabrics that have white, black and cream in them with OTHER colors
2. At least ONE of the three fabrics you use must be a flower print of some kind.

You can use your fabrics in multiple blocks as long as none of your blocks match.

Your flower print may be used as background, the "cactus" or the "pot." You may use more than one Flower print. Your Flower might be a bright print (left-over from Terri's churn dash swap last year), an Asian print, a 30's repro, a soft color-wash print . . . anything goes. Pull some flowers from your scraps, then chose some more scraps to go with them and have fun putting together interesting combinations. Use this month as an opportunity to clean out your scrap bin or to go shopping for some fresh new flower fabrics (and fabrics to coordinate with them!) The possibilities are endless . . . for a bit of inspiration, here are some of the blocks made by sneak peekers, Caroline, Ginny, Jill, Kate, Kathie and Rho.

This basket-style block will look great in on-point settings. I've been watching Wanda work out a wonderful setting for some great scrappy batik blocks on her blog, Exuberant Color. She used a popular lotto block from last year, double 4-patch, as her alternate block. Here's a photo of her quilt top in progress.

Clinking the photo will link you to Wanda's blog article about choosing fabric for setting triangles. As you can see, her color palette is more controlled than our scrappy blocks this month, but I think there's definitely a good setting idea here.