I am embarking on a One Block Wonder adventure. I hope that you will follow along with my journey! I am always excited to learn something new. When you’re quilting as long as I have been, you often times feel like there’s nothing new to learn. Well I did the old stack and whack a few years back when Cathy Roeder and I were at our cabin. That was fun. But the One Block Wonder seemed somehow different. It’s the same technique with different results. The difference is that there is a lot less negative space than the old stack and whack had. This is compact and creates a different look.
One day when I was with a rep in the back of the shop, we were looking at panels. I was lamenting over how the panels were pretty but they didn’t really fit in a modern quilt shop. There are some that were more modern than others, such as the Gingiber ones, and some of the ones by Stof. The ones from Timeless Treasures are beautiful. They are not modern. Any good business woman worth her salt knows this…..”Know your market, know your market, know your market”. So, I have a modern shop with many non modern quilters that visit it. They love my fabric and they are thrilled to see these less than modern panels. I need to adapt to fit my entire clientele. So I decided to stock up on many of these less than modern panels. What happened shocked me. I couldn’t keep them in stock. So, I am going to follow my customers hearts and buy more. But then, the rep told me something else. She said to use the One Block Wonder Design Tool on the internet and use the panels to design One Block Wonders. What happened truly was a wonder. The panel is the perfect thing to use for these. They have well defined repeats. All fabric have well defined repeats, but the effect from a panel is somehow amazing.
The panel that I used, above, turned out like the above photo using the design tool. My heart fell to my feet. It looked like Jack Frost Himself came down and frosted a window.
I don’t want to give away the entire technique for how to do this as this would not be fair to the author of the book One Block Wonder. She is a fellow C&T author. So, I am going to post a link to my you-tube channel where I describe how to use entire hexagons instead of half hexagons in putting this quilt together. The author uses half hexies. I know that I would never be able to do this. I need to design with the entire hexagon, so I am going to show you how to put these hexagons together to achieve perfect points.
