This year’s Block of the Month project is a real gem.
Rubies, Diamonds, Garnets Too … , a spectacular pieced quilt, is made in shades of red and white. The pattern for the first block appears in this Sunday’s Kansas City Star. A new block will be published in The Star on the third Sunday of every month. Look for it in the “House + Home” section.
Bernadette Kent of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, designed and stitched the quilt, and Laura McDonald, also of Calgary, quilted it.
Bernadette has been quilting for 23 years. In 1999, she opened a quilt shop, Traditional Pastimes, in Calgary. About three years later, American Patchwork & Quilting magazine named her shop a Top Ten Shop.
Bernadette has designed quilts, bags and miniatures since 2001.
Rubies, Diamonds, Garnets Too… features a variety of scrap fabrics. Bernadette relied on creamy to white fabrics for the backgrounds. She used fabrics with dots, checks, ditzies, florals, shirtings and plaids.
There also is a great variation in the reds. Instead of using solids and batiks, Bernadette incorporated small- and medium-size prints. The finished quilt is 68” square.
The blocks will be available throughout the year at www.PickleDishStore.com starting this Sunday. You also can download the monthly articles at www.KansasCityStar.com. Go to the “Lifestyle” tab, then “House + Home.”
But the templates in the downloaded article will be too small to use, so you will need to either purchase the pattern from www.PickleDishStore.com or, if you’re in the Kansas City area, pick up a Sunday paper.
