After seeing everyone's Farmer's Wife blocks popping up on Flickr and Instagram, I finally caved and started making some myself.
If you haven't heard of it already, The Farmer's Wife Sampler Quilt is a book by Laurie Aaron Hird that includes patterns for making 111 traditional 6" blocks. The book comes with a CD of printable template patterns, but no rotary cutting instructions. Experienced quilters will be able to calculate the size of the pieces (and thus avoid the templates) for many of the blocks, but some of them do require templates.
I'm working with a super-bright color scheme using Kona Pomegranate, Kona Poppy, Kona Flame, Art Gallery Empire Yellow, Free Spirit Citrine, and Kone Cyan.
I'm combining the bright solids with black and white prints, fussy cut bits of Echino Decoro, and black and white text and number prints.
I haven't decided exactly how many of these 6" blocks I'm going to make. The book quilt includes some motifs like baskets and nosegays that I'll probably skip, but I'm keeping my options open.
For now, I'm just going to treat this as an ongoing project and add to it whenever I have time!
