Hands2Help - Meet Our Canadian Guest Blogger, Joanne!

Hi, all!

Sunday is here, and once again, it's time for another great guest blogger for Hands2Help!  This week we are welcoming Joanne, who has the coolest goal on her blog - 50 scrap quilts per year!  Now that would make a dent in your scrap pile, wouldn't it?  She also blogs from the Frozen North, better known as Canada.  I'm so happy that we not only have a Canadian charity this year, we have a Canadian guest blogger too, so without further ado, I'll turn the blog over to her!

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Hi!  My name is Joanne, and I can be found hanging out at Quilts By Joanne!  Thank you Sarah, first of all for taking the challenge of creating Hands2Help and running with it and secondly for offering some guest blogger opportunities.  I'm excited to be one of those guest bloggers this year!

This year I am particularly happy to see a quilt charity from north of the border. Putting a quilt or a quilt top in the mail is a bit of a leap of faith. Sending it across an international border makes it that much more of a leap.  I hope some of you will take that leap!!

I have been sewing for over 50 years and took my first official quilt class in the winter of 1976, the year my daughter was born. Right from the start I loved the piecing aspects of quilting but felt that my applique skills fell short of the mark. So I consider myself after all these years to be a piecer.

For the last four years I have set myself the goal of making and donating 50 quilts a year. Some years I fall short for a variety of reasons but I continue to find that is a worthwhile and often achievable goal. I make scrap quilts and I love them. Every once in a while I get to make a quilt starting with yardage and that is a bit of a treat!

As most of us do, I have a few go-to patterns that I use over and over.  One is what I call simple bricks. The block is made of rectangles that are all the same size. So 1 1/2" by 2 1/2" or 2 1/2" by 4 1/2" or 3 1/2" by 6 1/2". When you are preparing to make one of these quilts the preliminary cutting is very straight forward and if you have the never ending supply of scraps that I seem to have then it is relatively simple to have enough ready to make a quilt.  I keep the scraps I would plan to use together in a used salad container. I have found when the container is full then I have enough rectangles for a quilt top.

This photo shows the sewing sequence for one block. Sew two bricks together on the long side. Sew one brick to the top and to the bottom. You will already be able to tell if your 1/4" seam is accurate because these should come out evenly. Then sew two pairs of bricks together on their short end. these get added to the sides of your block. When you set the blocks together alternate the direction the centres are facing. So one block is vertical the next one is horizontal. The small bricks make a 4 1/2" block, the next size up makes an 8 1/2" block and the larger size makes a 12 1/2" block. This makes a great project for group quilts because the kits are easy to assemble. Each block requires 8 identically sized pieces and novice stitchers only have to do straight stitching, no triangle points to lose, no curves to negotiate. The quilt shown is made of 2 1/2" by 4 1/2" scrappy pink bricks. 

Thanks for letting me share this quilt with you.  I hope you'll find it to be a useful scrap pattern!  I'd love to see some of these quilt popping up in the Hands2Help link-ups!  Piecefully, Joanne

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Thanks so much, Joanne, for a great post and a wonderful tutorial!  I know that this will be a great quilt design to use up a bunch of my (overwhelming) scraps!!  Maybe I'll tackle that blue bin of scraps that is currently running over.....

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And now, a public service announcement.  Kate Conklin, one of our Hands2Help sponsors, has written a lovely and moving blogpost about her experiences teaching in Nepal, which was recently hit with a devastating earthquake.  In an effort to raise funds, she is donating all the proceeds from her PDF pattern sales this week to the Himanchal Education Foundation for the rebuilding of schools in Nepal.  I hope you will go read her post and then check out her patterns - she has some wonderful designs, and if you are still looking for inspiration for your H2H quilt, maybe you will find it there!  I've made several quilts by her patterns, and they are wonderfully written and creative!!

Be sure to check back next week for another guest blogger and a chance to link up and show off your progress!  I can't wait to see what you all are working on!

Hugs!

Sarah

PS - Happy Mother's Day to all you moms out there!