More QAYG

 My darling sister Brooke is switching jobs and in January will begin working at a wonderful sewing machine/fabric shop. She will sell and teach and currently is preparing the first of her classes, which is a beginner's block of the month. I am helping her sew, quilt and assemble the sample.

There are 11 blocks to make in this year long class, but the 12th lesson, to make it a block of the month, is the assembly technique, quilt as you go. 

Here's a close-up of the assembled blocks. Since we are using white throughout, it is difficult to see that the narrow strip between each of the blocks is the 1" joiner, with the folded 2" on the backside. That's the trick of this QAYG method. To make it even more cohesive, we added a white cross to all the plain blocks.
As for me, I have a pile of uneven strips which have been nagging at me to use. So why not make them into blocks and quilt them as I go? These started out on a 12 1/2" backing and batting and I drew a rectangle on the batt 4 1/2" down the middle. I grabbed a bunch of my strips and cut them to 4 1/2"and sew and flipped them down the block. Then added strips along each side to fill out the whole. Trimmed to 12" I added a one inch strip between the two finished blocks and connected them on the back with a folded 2" strip, stitching in the ditch from the front. The skinny looking connecting strip on the front is that diagonal stripe. Neat huh?

Difficult to see, as it is white on white...Here are the steps:
1. Using a quarter inch seam, sew a 1 inch strip to the front of the block and at the same time sew a folded 2 inch strip to the back.
2. sew the second block to the one inch strip which joins the two blocks.
3. press the back strip over the butted seam and pin from the FRONT,
4. quilt in the ditch removing pins as you go
That's it.
I was all excited about the 'new qayg' method in my previous post, but this way is better for beginners, imho.