The Big Easy #1: 16" Blocks with Carrie Bloomston Fabrics

A perfect quilt sewing week for me is to have my blocks ready to sew together, layout determined, top made, backing and basting done, machine quilting and binding done without a hitch; a finally finish in the matter of a few days with no magical twitching of my nose involved. And it happened with my Big Easy #1 quilt.  I've been planning on making this quilt with my stash of Carrie Bloomston fabrics since April when I used some of it for my Beothuk Star Quilt.  After playing with this fabric and then deciding on the five fabrics used for this quilt, I knew I wanted to make another quilt with these fabrics soon. I've been buying Carrie Bloomston (Such Designs for Windham) fabrics for six years now starting with her first collection Collage and her subsequent lines; Paint, Story, Dreamer and her latest Wonder, some of each of these fabrics lines are in The Big Easy #1.  I just love everything about Carrie's fabrics, the colors, the patterns, the many texts, the big, medium and small scale prints and that each fabric line work well with each other.  

Coming up with the pattern was easy after looking at the prints and deciding big blocks were needed in order to show off the prints.  Once again I used my trusty graph paper after I decided that a variety of 16" finished blocks would be perfect for the Carrie fabrics with its different scales and patterns. I started with fourteen different blocks and added a few different ones later while I was assembling the blocks so the pattern shown here is not what The Big Easy #1 ended up being.

Depending upon the fabric, they were cut either in 8-1/2", 4-1/2" and 2-1/2" strips.  The 2-1/2" strips were sewn together for the different size of rail blocks needed.  After these strips were sewn and the 8-1/2" and 4-1/2" strips cut to size, the blocks were ready to be assembled. The rail strips were not cut until they were paired with the other patches in the block.

Each block was individually laid out on the design and the patches were not sewn together until all of the blocks were laid out.  I think this fluid way of assembling the blocks and doing the layout at the same time helped me to make sure the colors and patterns were evenly distributed and it was while doing this I came up with some additional block patterns.  

Once I was happy with the layout, surprisingly there were maybe one or two changes, the blocks were ready to be sewn  together and then the top.

I couldn't decide until the next day whether I wanted to do straight line or curvy line quilting and then came up with alternating the two and am very happy with the way it turned out.  I used Connecting Threads/Essential Threads in Parchment.

There was no question as to what to use for the backing which was the last yardage I had of Carrie Bloomston's popular and famous Newsprint, 108" width.  The binding, which is the only fabric that is not from her line, was also the last piece of Lakehouse Two-Tone Mini Check in black and gray which was the perfect accent fabric to go with all of the different prints in this quilt.  

The Big Easy #1 measures approximately 64" x 80".  If you're wondering about the name, I thought it was appropriate since the blocks were big and this quilt was so easy to make plus it's getting harder coming up with names. I know there are going to be other big easy quilts to make from my stash and just changing the number is so much simpler than coming up with a new name.  Now I understand why George Foreman named his sons George I, George II, etc.  I'm looking forward to curling up with this quilt, I won't need a book to read since there are so many texts and I keep finding new ones the more I look at this quilt.

Just a reminder that Tuesday, September 3rd is the start of the 2019 Online Quilters Meet & Greet hosted by Benita Skinner of Victoriana Quilts and I will be participating.  I will be posting on this day  to give you the links to Benita's website to you can visit the other quilt bloggers who are participating and enter into the drawing for some great prizes being offered.