Food quilts

As you may remember I am working on food quilts for both the grands.  The above is the first iteration of the first quilt.  When I saw it up on my design wall (the hallway with me standing in the middle bedroom to get far enough back!) I realized it should be titled 'indigestion'!  I took the first border off and searched through my stash for another fabric.

I found this cool fabric that I used on MY VERY FIRST QUILT!!!! It has strips of apples alternating with strips of apple seeds.  I only have a yard of it.

I really like the way it looks surrounding the food blocks.  But I am unable to cut the fabric!  I'm afraid that I will mess it up and not have enough fabric !(  Am totally blocked!  So I made a date with my girlfriend, Domino Sharon, who is also at a standstill on a project (a cute raincape that she could really use right now) and we are going to sew together and hopefully get these projects going!

In the meantime I am thinking about starting the second grands food quilt.  Artquiltmaker sent me an e-mail with Marcus' pattern 'patch-it'.  As it happens I had seen that pattern on another website and liked it.  So was going to use that for the second quilt.  Artquiltmaker suggested I do a test first.  That is so totally unlike me!  I usually just jump in and commit to whatever I decide and outcome be darned!  Well when I replied to AQ with that she gave me a big LOL!  So I decided to do a test.  What could it hurt?

The pattern requires a template ($20).  I am in a 'use what I have' mode and will not buy any quilting stuff (today).  So I studied the picture of the template and read the description and made my own out of matboard (remember the days when we made our own cardboard templates?  Neither do I!  But I had heard about doing that.

I have a mat cutter that I use to cut mats when I frame pictures and that worked great!  Nice straight edges with one cut.  The template is about 3 1/4 " square.  And it worked perfectly.  I didn't even slice it up when I was cutting! 

The pattern I had seen a week or so ago ( which I can't find on the internet again :(  ) suggested putting a black border around the colored squares so I did.

I could tell as I put this together that it wouldn't work for this quilt.  The food fabric isn't showcased so what is the point of using it?  The black border, however, does work with this pattern.

This did go together fairly  quickly, I finished it in about two hours.  Too bad I messed up the upper right corner.  But I'n not taking it out!  This is going in my bag of orphan blocks, along with the template!

The other reason (besides not showcasing the fabric) is that it wastes a lot of fabric.  The finished block is about half the size of the original from which the template-cut pieces were taken. 

The good thing is that this is an easy pattern that looks hard.  The negatives are that it wastes fabric and isn't a good choice for (my favorite) novelty fabrics.