I belong to several groups of quilters, and it’s an aspect of my quilting life that I really like. We are similar and yet diverse, we all enjoy quilting, and we encourage each other in our projects. One group in particular participates in regular swaps. Exchanges of blocks or fabric, so that we can then create a quilt with a little bit of our friends in it.

This particular exchange was in support of a quilt called Tumalo Trail from Bonnie Hunter. We swapped sets of small 3” nine patch blocks and squares of matching light and dark fabric. We decided this gave us more options as a group than swapping the actual blocks for that specific quilt. I decided early on in the swap to take this in my own direction so that method of exchange suited me just fine.

We swapped blocks over the period of a year, good golly I’m not even sure when at this point but I’m guessing somewhere around 2016 give or take a few years. I had an idea of a simple quilt on point with the nine patch blocks and decided that rather than making the background one single fabric, I could use the light background squares from the exchange for those. I had to cut some out of my stash to make up the layout but I liked the scrappy look I got rather than a single fabric look.

The big experiment in this quilt was making the setting triangles around the outside edge out of scrappy red fabrics. The idea was to really emphasize the on-point setting of the quilt by making the edges dark rather than just repeating the light background fabrics. I am very happy with how that turned out and I’m planning to use that technique on another UFO that I’m working on now (more on that later).

Going into 2020 I had about half of the quilt top pieced and all of the other stuff in a box and it had sat there for a couple of years. I decided it was high time I got it done. The borders are both out of my stash but I thought the colors suited the quilt top fine. Honestly there are so many colors in the nine patch blocks that I could have used anything in the border and it would have been fine but I’ve always liked this red print so that’s what I used.

The last piece of this was to use the same red for the binding, I didn’t want the binding to distract from the border or the rest of the quilt, and luckily I had enough of the red for both the border and the binding. One of the upsides of having a large stash.

I’m very happy with how this turned out and how it looks in my home, but the best part of all is how I can see my friends in this quilt every time I look at it. Up next week is a look at the Knitted Star quilt I did last year during a QAL on Instagram.