Civil War Roosting Round Robin update

My Civil War fabrics Roosting Round Robin guild challenge quilt has been waiting patiently for me to get back to it all of March. 

This is how it was looking at the end of February. I have kept the on point setting which is necessary because of my first block, the Tree of  Life. The round challenge for March was applique.

Here is my modern round robin with it's applique row. I strip pieced the different fabrics I'm using and then cut my initials and the date out from the strips and appliqued them on. 

This quilt is huge, by the way! I needed to wait until it was hung up on the wall at my guild meeting to be able to take a photo of it. As a complete aside, I know what I'm doing for the next row on this one thanks to flipping to the next month on my quilt calendar. (The art of the Quilt)

I decided to do a signature block of sorts on the civil war round robin quilt too. In this case I was inspired by a block from Cheri Payne's free quilt from last year, but the blocks finish at 10 inches. The applique hand was too small to look good on my 12 inch block and I didn't want to add a lot of stuff to fill in the background - so I traced my own hand!

Then I used some of the original applique pieces included on the block including this little bird. I love both of these prints, but the wing gets lost against the brown body of the bird.

I changed to the wing print to red instead and I love it!

One more thing to point out here: remember I'm only using yardage of the background prints and the rest are 2 1/2" strips. The hand is made of three strips sewn together and if you look close, the seam lines look like the lines on gloves. Pretty neat effect :)

I stitched around all the applique with the same brown thread by machine using a very small blanket stitch. 

This is where I'll leave things today. Here are the five blocks with some sashing. You can see I've worked on creating some quarter dresdens - they were actually my first failed attempt at an applique block as I made them to big for a 12" block.

Since I took this photo there have been some major design adjustments - perhaps the more math-inclined of you can already spy an issue? I didn't until it was time to start sewing the rows together!

Stay tuned - this one's a work in progress :)

With Joy,

Sarah V.