Fair Isle Quilt - a come back and some blocks

Last Saturday was supposed to be a "virtual" Sewing Day with a few of the Lazy Bums girls. I, of course, had great plans of sewing loads on the day... I picked up this long fallen out of love project: The Fair Isle Quilt from the sew along that I didn't manage to follow in 2014.

In advance of Saturday, I had already pieced all the "building blocks": HST and blocks of strips. One word one the strips actually... the pattern tells you to cut strips of a certain size for the building blocks. The strips are then sewn together and the building blocks cross cut into sections. So for example, if you need 4 sections 2' wide, the pattern would have told you to cut 8' strips. This is of course correct but I would have preferred to have cut longer strips (like 1' longer than needed). I know it waste a little fabric up front that way but you are sure to get all the sections you need, cut square. There are a lot of sections to cross cut so you want to be able to square up the edge every so often, which I did and ended up with one section too short so I had to remake one (this was especially true for the fir tree blocks below)

Anyway back to the building blocks, a lovely evening spent trimming and squaring up HST - all 120 of them. On the other end, the HST were big compared to the finished size so a bit of waste there.

 Next step for me, which was my mission for Saturday was to make the Poinsettia blocks, by far the more complex and time consuming blocks in the pattern. 10 are required in total

 One unit, 39 more to go!

 And finally my first block, finished indeed on Saturday night!

 By Sunday, I had made a little bit more progress with 5 blocks completed and 5 more nearly there!

 And last night I moved to the next blocks on the pattern, the fir tree block (6 are required).

 And the pink checkerborder, I approached this one with 9-patch blocks - 8 completed so far, 8 more to go before sewing them in a long border.

 And my first row is done, yeah!

I have made 24 blocks so far, plenty more to make! 

I am loving how this is turning out. And with most of the fabric cut (but the sashing) and the building blocks more or less finished, I am really hoping to have this quilt on my bed sometime in the winter. Wish me luck and watch this space!

So far 24 blocks for the 350 blocks challenge, not a bad start of the month!

Linking to Building Blocks Tuesday. Sew Cute Tuesday, Let's Bee Social and  Needle and Thread Thursday

Celine