Making my Mystery Block of the Month: July 2025

You’ll have seen that I plan to complete Sherri’s mystery block a month quilt and in my last post I shared the test blocks which I made into my ninth charity quilt, today I’m sharing the centre block I made for my own quilt.

I’m still behind where I thought I would be on this, but - life - and I’m ok with that.

This month’s block is a churn dash, and it’s my first. There were definitely some lessons in the four test blocks I shared yesterday. I much prefer the corner triangles to be dark, and for the central square to be light, and so I kept that in mind when selecting the fabrics.

It’s not a ‘star’ month so I had some freedom to choose which colours I wanted to use this month, and the rules by the way are ones that I’ve set myself to bring some more uniformity to my finished quilt - not that I know what that will look like at this point!

But anyway. I went with green.

When I’m sewing these blocks I’m constantly checking the layout, and which of the green borders I should use - as well as which sides they need to be on. That hand drawn, scribbled plan has been so, so useful for the latter.

I didn’t quite get the motif in the centre spot on, but I think that was possibly down to my cutting rather than my sewing. And in the scheme of the whole quilt, I’m not sure it’ll be noticeable.

But with the borders added, the photos taken and now the blog post shared this one is hanging in my craft room along with the six blocks that have come before.

I’m getting quite used to seeing them hanging on my bookcase, hopefully once all the blocks are made and sewn together I’ll get used to seeing it on a bed instead. Still a while to go yet, and I’m saving sharing the ‘quick peek at all the blocks together’ for a month or two more yet.

Next month it’s back to stars, so I know I’ll be using navy blue fabrics. I’m not sure yet though if I’ll need to add in some other colours to make the design work, so I’ll leave it there for now.

Join me next month to see how I get on with the next mystery block, and check out my previous posts for my mystery block quilt or the charity quilts made from the test blocks.

Half the Scraps

I’ve made another quilt as part of my quilting ‘stretch’ project using the block from Sherri at A Quilting Life’s mystery block a month. As I said then I don’t know if I’ll manage to make a quilt a month, but I won’t really know unless I try…

What I’ve learnt generally from this ‘stretch’ project is that while I’m using lots of fabric from my stash, I’ve also got a fair bit which remains from these projects which is already cut to the widths I’m generally using. So my plan for this quilt was to use up ‘all the scraps’ and to be ok with random fabric and pattern piecing.

My ninth charity quilt

So while my plan was to use ‘all the scraps’ in reality that didn’t work - not only was there more than I could use in my latest four block quilt, some of the colours jarred. So hence this quilt’s name of Half the Scraps!

I’m sure you’ll recognise at least some of the fabrics I settled on - in fact, they’ve all been used in previous quilts. Some as recently as last month, and at least one from way back at the start of the year.

The block itself was a churn dash, which I wasn’t sure about at all when I first saw it. I’ve not sewn one before, but actually now with five under my belt I can see the attraction.

Making the test blocks helps me understand how they go together, but also it helps show which colour placements are most successful, or which I like the most in any case. And this month it was the lower right block that worked best for me with it’s darker triangular corners, so that’s something I noted for my own Mystery Block quilt - come back tomorrow to see how that one went!

Adding the borders

As my aim was to use up the material strips I had left from earlier quilts, my plan was to embrace random log cabin borders - but within reason. I decided to still split the fabrics into two groups and try to keep them in the same half of the borders. I managed it pretty well for the green and peach striped fabric (an old summer shirt of MOH’s), but with less of some of the other patterns it was definitely more random.

I needed to twirl some of the blocks around to get a layout that worked for my eye, and so that the dominant pink ‘patchwork’ material (an old duvet cover) was more evenly spread.

But still I felt it wasn’t quite right.

I had no idea what colour final border to add. But then I remembered I was doing random, and so the final border could also comprise more than one fabric. And that helped a lot. On the pinker edges I used a paler fabric, and on the paler edges I used a new multicoloured pink fabric which came from mum’s stash.

It’s also the fabric that I’ve used on the reverse of the quilt, so it fits in with this month’s ethos of using what I had cut. More so actually as the strips leftover from the backing piece haven ‘t even made it into the scrap stash pile!

Now that it’s finished I’m much happier with it, but during its construction I was less sure. I also tried a different way of quilting this one - and well, I learnt why most quilts aren’t quilted in circles! It’s hard and the material on the back wants to pucker up more than normal. It’s not something I’ll be trying again for a long while, that’s for sure!

You can see my other quilts which I’ve made to donate to Project Linus - a charity whose mission is to provide love, a sense of security, warmth and comfort to children, who are sick, disabled, disadvantaged or distressed through the donation of new, homemade, washable quilts and blankets, including those that are part of this ‘stretch’ project in earlier posts. I’m aiming to publish an update on my progress in the last week of each month for the remainder of 2025.

Post Comment Love 5 - 7 September

Hello there, and welcome to this week’s #PoCoLo - a relaxed, friendly linky which I co-host with Suzanne, where you can link any blog post published in the last week. We know you’ll find some great posts to read, and maybe some new-to-you blogs too, so do pop over and visit some of the posts linked, comment and share some of that love.

Please don’t link up posts which are older as they will be removed, and if you see older posts are linked then please don’t feel that it’s necessary to comment on those. If you were here last week it was great to have you along, if you’re new here we’re pleased you’ve joined us.

Well hello September! Already!

I’m sure it comes around more quickly these days, and I was just getting the hang of August-ing. We finished the month with a visit to a local tropical garden here in Nottinghamshire, which isn’t a normal place for a tropical garden. But it was magical, and my photo this week is looking up through the monkey puzzle tree, which are always a favourite, and one that’s easy to spot!

Have a great week.

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