My friend Angela and her blog buddy Amanda started The Farmer's Wife quilt-along quite a while ago. I had most of my blocks done when they started, so I never jumped in. But now that sewing around here has taken on the theme of getting things finished, I got my box of TFW supplies and checked out where I had left off.

I'm kind of obsessive about organizing and probably need some type of intervention. When I made each block, I printed off the block templates from the web and filed the page with the completed block. Then I filed everything numerically. I'm laughing at myself as I'm typing this, but seriously it did help me to know where to pick back up. There are 111 blocks in this quilt, and I wanted to set mine just like the author, Laurie Aaron Hird.

I purchased a block of the month from Primitive Gatherings, and it's some of the best money I've spent on this quilting habit. Not only were the instructions clear but the beautiful fabrics were a generous cut. I think there is enough fabric left over for another quilt. We'll see some day down the road because I'm giving my leftovers to Audrey so she can make her Farmer's Wife.

And I found a couple of indispensable tools that I feel helped make these blocks turn out so well. One is the 1/4" foot that I bought for my Bernina, and the other is a roll of white freezer paper. Some of the pieces to these blocks are odd shapes. I would trace the template onto the freezer paper, iron the paper to the fabric, and cut the pieces from there. Some of the rotary cutting directions from Primitive Gatherings used hard to cut dimensions of 3/16" and those marks are not on my Omnigrid rulers. And again I steam pressed open a lot of the seams to help keep the blocks flat.

Some of the blocks are still a bit wonky. At this point, I am not planning to repiece any of them. NancyZ can work wonders machine quilting; and in the long run, the wonky pieces will be hard to find once the quilt is finished and on the bed.

And Laurie Aaron Hird told me she tried to piece blocks that never made it to this quilt and ended up in the trash instead. My hero!