Hello friends!

How is it going with the triangles? Sometimes I get lazy and instead of marking the line to sew on, I just fold the square in half and finger press the line. Some of these squares are so small, you are not going to get off track doing it that way.

Merie and Kim both had all their blocks at the shop today, and so we laid them out on the tables. Here are blocks 1-45 in two different sets of fabrics (that still look pretty good together!



I have to say, having 45 blocks done makes a nice little stack of blocks!


Block 41 - this block gives you two arrow-shaped areas that are a good size for larger-scale prints.


Block 42 - this is another one that I think of as a "mountains and sky" block.


Block 43 - a series of arrows emerges when you stack up the flying geese units!


Block 44 - two larger flying geese stacked up - once you make your geese units, try them both ways to see which one you like best!

I decided I liked the darker fabric on the edges. But isn't it interesting what a difference it makes in the feel of the block?


Block 45 - it took me a long time to decide which fabrics to use here. I decided to use the same print in different colorways for the geese and lighter colors for the skies.




How do you keep your pieces organized? Kim and Merie both like to cut blocks ahead of time in order to maximize their sewing time once they are able to sit at their machines. But cutting on the weekend or a few days before sewing means you need a way to keep your pieces organized and clearly sorted in the meantime. Here are two ways to do that.

Merie uses her homemade Lori Holt-style mini design boards to keep her pieces together. These can be stacked and even stored vertically in her sewing bag without the pieces slipping around! Slips of paper help her remember which set of pieces is for which block. (Lori Holt has a tutorial on her blog!)



Kim uses Press-n-Seal for her block pieces, laying out the pieces in the configuration they will be sewn in, and writing the block number on a corner of the little packet. (The Press-n-Seal is not easy to see in this picture, but the block pieces are sandwiched between two sheets.)


Here are Kim's most recent blocks:




Barb's Christmas 100/100 so far:


And here are the blocks a 100/100 club member stopped in to show us:



Finally, if you bought your City Sampler book at the shop this year, page through and see if there are printing errors like the one shown below:

Some of the books our distributor shipped us had a run of eight pages that looked like this, a mistake made in the color run at the printers. We've arranged to have copies without this error shipped to us and will swap out books for you. New copies are on the way - call before you bring your book in to make sure we have a fresh one in stock for you!

Until next week - happy sewing!
~ Quilter's JEM