Back to Farmer's Wife Blocks!

It's been a while since I published a blog on the progress of the Farmer's Wife blocks that I completed back in January!  I found some significant yardage back here in New York so I managed to finish bordering them all last week!  I am going to make the king sized quilt in two pieces each 5 blocks wide by 9 blocks long.  These are the 30's FW blocks that I did.  For some reason, I missed quite a few in the book but have now given away the book.  I had one block left over which is one I wasn't all that crazy about anyway.  This is the second half.  The blocks finish at 8 1/2 inches square.  The strips around the regular blocks were cut 1 3/4 in wide and the half square triangles were cut from a 5 1/2 in square.  It used a lot of fabric but I must have had a full bolt of this off white fabric.

This was the first half of the quilt.  I am very pleased with it.  I found some leftover striped blue fabric that I am going to cut up and use as an outside border.  First will be a border of the off white and then a narrow border of green.

After I finished all the blocks from the 30's book, I decided I might as well do the 20's blocks, of which I have about 10 more so this quilt will be 9 x 11 blocks I think.  The blocks are very bright and I had a really difficult time deciding on how I would border them and how i would set them.  You can see this set is columns of straight set and then on point set and then straight set.

I thought I would like the green for setting the blocks as the yellow is so bright but didn't like it at all.  The background green is a better match than it looks in this picture however.

I found some significant yardage of a very pale yellow and decided that I would try that.  It is not perfect but is okay.  There is so much bright yellow in the blocks in this bunch of blocks.

This was my first day's work and you can clearly see the yellow background.  In some ways, it almost mutes the brighter yellow.  So I forged ahead!

And here is what is done after two days.  I actually found one of those slotted rulers that had 1/4 markings which made the cutting of the strips much more accurate.  These blocks also finish at 8 1/2 inches.  I am going to use purple and dark green in the borders to try to tone it down a bit.  I won't be doing any of the machine quilting until I get back to NC where my faithful Juki is as well as my pool noodles which make basting much easier!  I don't put on borders anymore until I finish machine quilting the whole quilt and get the two sections sewn together.  They lay so much flatter that way and i never have to measure the outside!