Quilt in A Box

For the last two years, my splinter group in Cobblestone Quilters Guild , Indigo Quilters, has been working on a quilt in a box project.

What is a quilt in a box you ask?  It is a type of block exchange where you get a little more control of the type of quilt you end up with.  I have been involved in several block exchanges were everyone makes you a specific block out of their fabric.  Unfortunately these have remained "orphan" blocks because the fabric just didn't play well together and there were not enough blocks that an odd block or two will fade into the background.

In a quilt in a box - you provide the fabric:  the focus and a background to be used in every block and a variety of coordinating fabric to be used.  Each person working on the project picks a block to make and they make that same block for everyone else in the group out of each persons fabric.  So at the end you end up with a sampler quilt that goes together. The boxes were exchanged at our monthly meetings and we did not get to see inside our box again until the very end.

My focus fabric is the black, white and gold floral print in the block below and the background fabric is the white with light grey print.  The block I made for myself and eleven other is called Nosegay and is a combination of paper piecing and traditional piecing.

The black and gold are additional fabric I had in my box.

One of the blocks made by another quilter is this star block.  I need to get names of each block and who made them to put on my label when the quilt is finished.

Another block is this quarter circle applique block:

We started this project in September 2012 and finished this past September.  I am planing to quilt each block separately (as I machine quilt much better on a smaller project) and set the blocks on point.  The black border in the pictures is actually the beginning of the sashing I am using.  The outer border is a black and white paisley print and I intend to use it as a guide for my quilting design.  I am planning on using gold thread for the quilting.  

The fun part of this project (besides a quilt out of fabric you like) is seeing how different your block looks out of different fabric.  This is a Nosegay block I made back in March.

One word of warning if you do this project - make sure you like the block you are making and that it is well with in your skill level to do quickly - it seemed like I had just finished one box when the next was due!