Tuesday Tips with Eleanor Burns: December Block Party

Eleanor Burns is back again this week with some fantastic tips and a great tutorial showing you how to put together a sampler quilt.

This sampler quilt was inspired by the 1930s newspaper patterns you'd find in newspapers like the Kansas City Star. Quilters would look forward to making a block each week that they could share with their neighbors. It was similar to the sampler quilt Eleanor is showing you in the video below. You’d make one row with all the same blocks, and when you get to the next block, you make it a little bigger than the next block. Then all through the center you can make all the blocks smaller but the same size.

For this sampler quilt, you will need the following number of blocks:

Seven (7) Traditional Fans

Two (2) Fan Baskets

Three (3) sets of Spider Webs

One (1) English Flower Garden

One (1) Ocean Wave

One (1) Goose in the Pond with 1 ¼” Framing Border

Two (2) Posey Blocks with 3” Framing Border

One (1) Dresden Plate with 1 ¼” Framing Border

Two (2) Arrow Blocks

One (1) Crow’s Nest Block

See Eleanor’s tips below…

*You can choose to do a straight binding or a bias binding, but Eleanor shows you how to do the bias one.

*Don’t panic if you’re short ¼” one side or even a ½”, all you have to do is put your foot on the sewing machine and stretch them to meet. It’ll work out in the quilting.

*The Quilt in a Day scallop ruler allows you to make different sizes of scallops to match your quilt. It’s really unique because many rulers only give you one size to do.

*You want to have 9” scallops for big quilts.

Watch Eleanor in action below and get started on your sampler quilt while it's still fresh in your head!