Throwback Thursday - The Sunny Sampler

When I came across the Throwback Thursday link-up in my wonderings through quilt-blogland, I thought it was a great idea, because I made most of my quilts before I started the blog. It would be fun to share some of them with the online community and I think it makes sense to start from the beginning - with my officially first quilt I made in a basic patchwork course I took at the Silk Road craft school in Kharkov, Ukraine.

I have so many fond memories connected with that course, my group mate Olya and our wonderful teacher Svetlana - it's impossible to recount everything, I'll just show you some of the blocks. 

Basically, in each 3-hour class we studied one technique, made one 30 cm block, and then could practice this technique at home, making another block or two.

We started with the simplest: learning how to use mat, ruler and cutter by cutting some random strips and piecing them together. They were intentionally "scrappy" not to stress out too much about precision in the beginning:

Then the strips had to become straight and precise as we tackled the Log Cabin...

... and some strip-piecing variations:

Sure enough, we did half-square and quarter-square triangles:

That in itself is enough to master most traditional quilting blocks, but we went boldly further to do foundation piecing...

Machine-piecing Y-seams (this is perhaps my favorite block in the sampler, although they all are in a way)...

Curves...

English paper piecing...

Dresden Plate...

and Mariner's Compass to crown it all!

Not only did we learn how to piece all of these blocks, we also learned how to do all the maths and  make your own templates and how to "read" a quilt to understand how it's made. 

I actually made more blocks than I needed for my chosen layout, so I still have some of them neatly folded somewhere.

As I chose such a bright palette (to match our bedroom wallpaper, actually), the name "Sunny Sampler" kind of stuck to it long before it was done, so I decided to take it literally (I take everything literally, this is my problem ;))) and made a sun centerpiece for it:

Then I had an idea - to continue the sun rays into the border - so the border is strip-pieced at different angles, and to let the rays go on indefinitely into the space I had to do without binding, so the quilt is faced.

AND I quilted it (mostly in the ditch) on my domestic Janome (because there was no other option available). To make my life more difficult, I decided to quilt the central circle in a spiral, and, as it was before I learned free motion quilting, I had to rotate the whole 2.10 meter squared through the machine - picture that ))

After trying all that in my first quilt, I am afraid of nothing the world of quilting can throw at me)))

The Sunny Sampler  took part in our family shot a couple of years ago, when it was young and fresh, and it still spends its days on our bed, although the bed and the bedroom are different now and there is no wallpaper to match - it makes the rented flat feel so much more like home))

Please do visit the link-up and have a look at other people's quilty memories))