Fat Quarterly Issue 6 is here - check out my Churn dash Designer Challenge contribution!

Do you know about Fat Quarterly?  I'm guessing if you are reading this post that there is at least a 50-50 chance you do.  It is a fantastic online quilting magazine that I discovered in the past year here since I've been active in blogland and I bought all the back issues and a subscription.  I've enjoyed every issue and made a few of the projects (and have several more queued up)!

Quite a while back, I submitted a project to the Fat Quarterly Reader Challenge - the Circular Logic Pillow. And I won the small project category (!!) which still blows me away. I do love that pillow.  The pillow was shown in Issue 5 of FQ. I was honored and thrilled to say the least.

Anyway, shortly after that the editors asked if I'd be willing to participate in the Issue 6 Designer Challenge feature - this is a feature where a traditional block or other theme is assigned and then several quilters or sewists put together an interpretation of their own.  My submission was for the "Churndash" quilt block theme...and it's available now!

I know right? "Designer"?  Me? not exactly. But it was really fun and I actually do enjoy sketching out quilt blocks and quilts with my colored pencils (or in ink in the back of my notebooks at work during particularly long drawn out tele-conferences)

Here is a basic churn dash block diagram:

And here is my interpretation:

There is a pretty long explanation in the FQ Issue 6 explaining my thought process, but essentially I wanted to replace the HST corner units with quart circle units. Oriented like this, you can generate circles at the intersections of the blocks.  Below you can see how this looks with just 4 blocks. I haven't had a chance to build a whole quilt top yet, but I think I'll like it.  I already want to make a 2nd variation though that I'll call "Drunkards Churndash" because I think corner blocks that have more of the center portion print would look really interesting - but it would be a pretty different look.  When (if) I do, perhaps I can add a tutorial for the block and even possibly a whole quilt pattern (a first timer's version of one anyway).

The editors at FQ took the basic instructions I sent for these blocks and formatted them to be a pretty intelligible tutorial if you are really keen to see it in the meantime. Please go support Fat Quarterly and buy Issue 6 - there are so many great patterns using different fabrics than only quilting cottons (even a paper quilt that I love).   You can preview the issue first on the website if you aren't convinced.

cool.