Civil War Diary Quilt

Civil War Diary Quilt
Block 2
Oath of Allegiance
5/20/17

Fabrics used:

Kona White

Red/Salmon (Medium): Doodle Box Red, Cori Dantini by blend – The Adventurers

Turquoise Blue (Dark): The fabric line is not on the selvage.  Also, the front looks exactly like the back.  I hope when all is said and done, you won’t be able to tell.

Also, I am planning on using other fabrics as I go through each block but I’ll be starting with these three for now.  I am also planning on staying within the colorways.

Machine pieced

Started: Mother’s Day 2017

Completed:

Quilt to be finished at:

Blocks will finish at 6″ in the quilt.

Resources: To Calculate the measurements of the squares to create HSTs http://www.mywebquilter.com/CalculateHalfSquareTriangles.aspx

STORY

 

As posted on the blog on 5/16/17: I’ve had the book Civil War Diary Quilt by Rosemary Youngs since the rage a few years ago.  But didn’t make the quilt for one reason or another.  I decided one morning that I wanted to start.  I’d been thinking about modern quilts and traditional quilts and I grapple between the two.  I have not made a “modern” quilt as I’ve been trying to finish up some things over the last few years and the urge to stop what I was working on to work on other things was kept at bay.  Now, my sewjo has left me again and the old tactics I’ve used in the past to get it back are simply not working.  I think it’s time I start something new.  And how fun it would be to create this traditional quilt normally created with civil war reproduction fabrics in my current 2 favorite colorways.  Actually salmon/pink is my color and somehow this red took over.  I plan to put more salmon/pink in the quilt to reduce the red effect.  I love how the turquoise blue looks with the salmon.

The intro of the book provide instructions on how to do the blocks by hand with templates and foundation piecing.  It seemed overly complicated to me.  So I purchased the Civil War Diary add on from Rosemary Young for EQ7.  I have EQ7 but I’m not proficient in it and very rarely use it.  I bought it because I knew I would use it for this book, Dear Jane, and other quilts I want to make in the future.  Since this is the first real project I’m using EQ7 I’m struggling.  Any pointers would be much appreciated.  I was able to get the Civil War Diary blocks into EQ7.  The blocks are not in the same order as they are in the book and there isn’t a way to search for them.  If you know of a way to search, please let me now.  For now, I have to scroll through all 121 blocks and examine them closely to see if it resembled the first block.  Of course, the first block in the book was the last block in the program.  I’m rearranging them as I find them so that the first block is really first in my block library for this project.  To be fair, I haven’t taken any of the tutorials for the program.  I do plan on taking them one of these days to help me get my bearings.

I figured out how to print the block with “rotary cutter” instructions.  It’s kind of helpful in that it gives me the measurements of what to cut.  But it’s not completely intuitive.  For example, the first block finished looks like this:

Civil War Diary Quilt
Alarming Conditions
Block 1
5/14/17

 

Civil War Diary Quilt
Block 2
Oath of Allegiance
5/20/17

 

Civil War Diary Quilt
Block 3
Conscript Law
5/29/17