slab blocks | Silver Thimble Quilting

To celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday, the Canadian Quilting Association is inviting quilters to be part of Canada’s biggest Quilt Bee.

The Big Quilt Bee will be held June 14-17, 2017 at Quilt Canada 2017 in Toronto, Ontario. There will be sewing machines, long arms, mid arms and an army of volunteers ready to work on quilt tops and stacks of slab blocks that have been made and sent in by hundreds of Canadian quilters.

The goal is to make and donate 1,000 quilts for kids at Ronald McDonald Houses across Canada.

The blocks that are making up the quilts are 12.5″ slab blocks incorporating at least one piece of special Canada fabric that has been printed this year in honour of Canada’s 150th birthday. Slab blocks were made famous when Cheryl Arkison used ‘slab’ blocks in quilts for families who lost everything in the Alberta floods in 2013. Now, with Cheryl’s permission, Canadian quilters are once again making slab blocks for a worthy cause.

Instructions on how to make slab blocks:

Quilting-Bee-How-to-make-a-block

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This is a piece of one of the special Canada 150 fabrics that can be used in these blocks.

On January 21, 2017, the local university donated classroom space to our guild so that we could dedicate a day to making slab blocks and assembling quilt tops. The room was a bee hive of quilters cutting, sewing, and pressing their scraps together into colourful blocks.

By the end of the day we had a handful of completed tops and stacks of completed blocks. I took my slab blocks home and completed two quilts.

Canada 150 Slab Quilt – red and blue

Canada 150 Slab Quilt close up

Canada 150 Slab Quilt – green and purple

Canada 150 Slab Quilt closeup

Last night at our guild meeting, everyone brought the quilts that they had finished to date for a group picture. The Canadian Quilting Association is eager to hear how everyone is doing and anxious for us to report in as they are keeping a tally of the number of completed quilts towards the 1,000 finished quilt goal.

I am on a mission to use up all of the green fabric strips that are on my fabric shelf. The first quilt top that I made was, “Candy Coated” a pattern from Sunday Morning Quilts (by Cheryl Arkison and Amanda Jean Nyberg).

This quilt top met with a mishap when I tried to trim the left side. It ended up being narrower than I would like after my attempt at squaring it up. After agonizing over ideas to make the quilt wider again, I have given up and made the quilt shorter instead. Now it is back in proportion to its width and is still plenty long enough for a lap at 63″ x 75″. I will finish squaring it up after it is quilted.

CANDY COATED – 63 in x 75 in

I ended up with many chunks of pieced fabric strips as leftovers after finishing Candy Coated so I came up with a second quilt which alternates the pieced strips from Candy Coated with framed four patches. This is a “leftover” quilt. That name doesn’t seem too glamorous, so it has since been renamed “Strings and Cobblestones” by my good friend LindaJ. I like this name better than Leftovers, so Strings and Cobblestones it is.

STRINGS AND COBBLESTONES – 57 in x 73 in

I still have leftovers from Strings and Cobblestones so I am working on making “slabs” from the bits. In years gone by, these types of blocks were called Crumb Blocks or Mile a Minute blocks but now in the Sunday Morning Quilts book, the updated name seems to be “slabs”. I have made several quilts using this technique over the years and it is the only way i have ever found to ensure that 100% of every last little bit of fabric is used in some way. After putting together slabs, there are no leftovers!

Green slabs.

Shhhhhhhh…….someone thinks he is hiding.

Silver Thimble Quilting

Every quilt has a story to tell; if you are quiet and listen, you will hear it.

Category Archives: slab blocks

Canada’s Big Quilt Bee

Using up the Green Strips