Long time Gone

The title of this post is not a comment on how long it has been since my last post, (however true it might be).  No, Long Time Gone is the name of a new-ish quilt pattern by Australian quilter Jen Kingwell.

A quilter friend of mine (I'm looking at you, Rosemary) is almost finished with a Jen Kingwill quilt, and was making plans to work on Long Time Gone for her next project.  Somehow, she tempted me to go along for the ride.   This is what Jen Kingwell's quilt looks like:

It's a sampler of many recognizable patterns such a Churn Dash, Pineapples, Log Cabin and Trip around the World.  Many of the quilts I have seen onlline in this pattern use light, modern fabrics, but I have been inspired by all those traditional patterns to go in a historical direction and use Civil War reproduction fabrics for mine.  I also see this as a great way to use up all the little scraps of CW fabrics that I have left over from other projects.

First up for me is the Trip Around the World section in the lower left corner.   I put together an array of fabrics that I thought would work well:

Strip piecing would have been quicker, but I wanted to be able to visualize the final block, so I cut out all those little pieces and stood back to take a look:

Good thing I went with a preview. I did not like it. At all.  Icky browns in the center and sad blue on the outer edge.  Back to the fabric pile, and a new selection was made:

I ditched the sad blue and the ick brown and threw in some purple and green.  Let's try this again:

I like this one a lot better, but something about the center needed a bit of pop, so I tossed a red fabric into the very center, and I brightened up the outer corners with a light tan.

Finally, I was ready to sew this baby together!  I started by sewing each row, and laid them out with a numbered piece of paper to keep track of the order:

My finished Trip Around the World block looks like this:

Now you may ask yourself, what about all those little 1.5"  squares that she cut up but didn't use?

Not to worry!  I am also working on a Mystery Block of the Month by Kathleen Tracy called "Welcome Home" which called for a dozen little nine patch blocks using 1.5 inch squares.  The spare blocks were used to make these:

It's a Win-Win!


Number of pieces in this pattern section:  169
Number of pieces in Long Time Gone quilt so far:     169