January Oh Hello Done Complete

Well, learned another lesson about saving - however, hitting the “delete” button on my blog composer doesn’t help too much.

While we are still only in the first days of January, I’ve gotten my quilt top done for my January Oh Hello Done goal. I started over the New Year’s Day holiday and finished it up this weekend. I decided to make from Pinterest the Double Slice quilt. This pattern uses a layer cake, but you could easily adapt it to any square cut you’d like.

I had gotten a layer cake as a freebie when you purchase so much from Missouri Star. I was actually stumped with how to use it and it has sat in my craft room for a while because it isn’t my normal color scheme and pattern. So, I really didn’t want to invest too much time and energy into using it…but I wanted to use it…eventually. So, when I set selected the the layer cake when I settled on the pattern. This felt like the right time to use it.

So, the first step to this is to cut the squares into 3 1/2” and 6 1/2” rectangles. Then, you flip one stack of rectangles over so you sew the last piece to the first and so on.

Then, you’ll get a block like this:

Now, one length of your block is still 10” x 10” and you’ll cut every square in half (at 5”) and mix your pieces up again to make the final block before you sew everything together.

Now, with this quilt I did more laying out than I usually do and what some of the tutorials suggested. I feel like I know why the layer cake was a freebie - there were many pieces that there were four pieces of the same cut of material. I have not ever had that many layer cake pieces be the same more than twice. I didn’t catch it until I was sewing pieces together and was getting many that were the same combinations.

However, that aside, I’d like to try this with only two solid colors - I think you could arrange the blocks into some neat patterns using only two colors. But, if you do want to use a pattern based layer cake, I do think the best result will be with one that has single, at most two cuts of the same material. If you do use a layer cake with multiple pieces of the same cut of material I do recommend going through the layer cake first and splitting up the pieces that are the same. Many pieces in my quilt were the same and in my final placing, I did have to move some pieces around a few more times than usual so they weren’t too close.

Also, this pattern would be a good first quilt for a new quilter to make. It’s straight lines and sews up quickly. Also, the only seams you have to worry about the nesting are when you sew the rows together (seams where you join the blocks need to nest). So, this was more good practice in working on my 1/4” seams and pressing skills.

With the layer cake, my quilt was 6 blocks wide and 7 blocks long. I actually liked it a lot more after I got it altogether.

I do think I will practice my domestic machine quilting - since it is al fairly straight, it’ll be a good study in practicing my straight-line quilting techniques.

That being said, there were some beautiful pieces of material in this layer cake and I’m happy with the final result. I’ll definitely reuse the pattern - nice, simple, and quick!

How is your quilting journey going so far this 2020 - have you started working on your January goals? What’s on your radar to get done? Let me know in the comments!