Working on the New Block of the Month Quilt

Designing, making, and writing the directions for a block-of-the-month sampler quilt always seems to have me frazzled. I want each BOM quilt to have a theme, so that's the first task. The theme of the new quilt is "Building Blocks", which, coincidentally, is the name of the quilt. When I selected the theme of building blocks, what I had in mind was all of the building toys I played with as a kid. I wanted each block to be named after a different building toy, so I sat down and began brainstorming the names of toys.

Legos, Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, erector sets . . . . . Uh, wait . . . that's only four. The quilt has twelve blocks.

And so I began some online research into different types of building toys. I certainly found a lot of very interesting toys. Some of them I had seen and my own children had played with, but I certainly didn't know the official name of the toy. Other toys I had never seen before but was intrigued by them. One such toy is Kapla, a French toy made from marine pine.

It just goes to show you. Quilt projects can take you to some unusual places. I got to revisit my childhood and some really cool websites with really cool toys!

Oh, and by the way. Yes the quilt is done and will debut July 2008 on my website, nancyrinkdesigns.com.