AFTERNOON DELIGHT---Month 12

 The good folks at The Quilt Show decided to release Month 12 early so you can finish the last four applique blocks and get to the layout process. 

BIG REMINDER: If you haven't done it yet, be sure you save and/or print all 12 months patterns. They will no longer be available from The Quilt Show after December 31, 2020. After that date you will have to buy them from Sue Garman's website: Come Quilt.

Here is my Afternoon Delight, made with the Kit fabrics that were available from The Quilt Show. One IMPORTANT thing to NOTE--I increased the size of the narrow black border. Sue's instructions had it cut at 1", for a 1/2" finished narrow border. Mine was cut 1.5" to  finish at 1". I also increased the size of the outer blue border, cutting mine 5.5" while the pattern has you cut them 4.5". It's your quilt, you get to decide:

I had amazing help from 7 of the Sunday Sew and Sews in cutting up the fabric for all the blocks so they made the fabric choices for the applique blocks. As I mentioned in the Month 11 blog, Sue Garman created this quilt with X and O applique blocks and laid them out in an alternating placement. You will decide how to lay your blocks out based on the fabrics you selected as you made each block. 

Make your placement choice and take a photo. Do that BEFORE you ask others their opinions. After they rearrange your quilt many ways, you can put it back the way you like. 

What if you've gotten tired and just don't want to make the entire quilt? That's OK. I made a small one earlier this year because I had to  make some demo blocks for this blog:

Here are two smaller versions made by students I had in a local class:

Anna Lee

Jill 

How about if you just don't want to do applique at all? Or you have leftover Double 9 Patches? I made a baby quilt from all the leftover Double 9 Patches that came back to me from the Sunday Sew and Sews who worked on this top:

The Sunday Sew and Sews who  helped on this project deserve one more thank you now that we have come to the end of this project. They made it possible to get the top made in 5 weeks so it could be sent to the quilter. I can't thank them enough for their help and friendship:

You might be thinking about the quilting. Here is a detail of what was done on mine by the longarm quilter, Lois Kindley. The crosshatch over the Double 9 Patches works very well. There is a swirly circle pattern over each applique block, very similar to what is in the perimeter triangles. You can't really see it but with the raw edge applique I wanted a good bit of quilting on those blocks and this was a good choice. I really like the border quilting designs, I just would have preferred the thread color blend with the blue background. The interior of this quilt is most important, not the border. There are lots of decisions to make when having someone else quilt your quilt, try to think of as many as you can. And try to learn something from each quilt you make, so the next one is even better:

When it was time to quilt my smaller, red, white and blue version, I did a diagonal line through the Double 9  Patches, skinny orange peels in the white squares of the Double 9 Patches, stitch in the ditch in the Shoo Fly Blocks and I free-hand echo-quilted the applique blocks. The borders were fun to quilt with curved crosshatching and scallops. In fact, the entire quilt was fun to quilt:

And just so the last four applique blocks from Month 12 don't feel left out, here they are. Sue said these were the easy ones so she saved them for last:

Block 37

Block 38

Block 39

Block 40

I hope you had a good time on our Journey this year, as we celebrated the great Sue Garman, who I miss every day. This quilt had been on my bucket list for years so I am glad I now have two of them.

Let's quilt.

Barbara