Your first challenge: The Making it up as you go quilt!

For our first quilt I've chosen one of the quilts from Block Party- the Confetti Quilt. At least that's what you'll want to look up if you want to see it in the book. I've renamed it the "Making it up as you go" quilt, because that's what I found myself doing as I worked on the sample blocks.

The idea of the Confetti Quilt is this- you take squares of fabric (varying in size), frame each one in a background fabric, and then put all of the little "windows" (as my daughter dubbed them this morning) together like a puzzle, adding in strips of background fabric where needed, to make an approximately 13x13 inch square. (I will be photocopying and sending the instructions out with the fabric, so if this doesn't make sense, don't panic. Just go with the directions that were clear enough to print in a book. :) ) The end result is supposed to resemble confetti that's landed on the background.




The reason I've named it the "Making it up" quilt, is because while you could plan it all out (and you're welcome to), I kept finding myself having to improvise and go in different directions than I'd planned. So go with that, if you find yourself in the same situation. And while I don't usually love wonkiness (at least in quilts), this quilt lends itself to it quite well, so go ahead and embrace that too.

Without any further rambling, here are my fabric selections:


and two sample blocks:



Feel free to make your squares as big, little, varied, as you want. Use as many or as few of the fabrics as you want- I'm really looking for variety in the finished blocks, so just go to town. :)

I'll be sending everyone a fat quarter of the background material (Kona cotton in Snow) and one 4 1/2 x 4 1/2 square of each of the other fabrics. That's enough fabric to make 1 or 2 squares, depending on how big your confetti pieces are (if they're bigger then you use less of the background material, so you could plausibly make 2.) If you're in the position to make 2 and want to, go for it. If not, just send me back the unused fabric. The finished squares should be approximately 13x13 (using this technique you can get a little stuck and not be quite at 13x13), not smaller than 12.75x12.75. I'll be putting sashing in between them, so I can work around different sizes. I'll just make it up, right? :)

As soon as I have everyone's addresses I'll be mailing things out, so keep an eye on your mailbox! I can't wait to see what everyone comes up with!