Sampler Dilemma!!

My daughter, Sarah, and my good friend, Charlene, and I have been meeting weekly to quilt the last 2 years; how time flies!  We take time off in the summer, we hand quilt, and it gets a little to warm to have a large quilt on your lap.  That's when we switch to small quilts, but summer activities limit our weekly quilt-ins.

Which brings us to a new group challenge.  It's more fun to work on the same thing, we learn from each other......and it is just plain fun to get together.  We eat, laugh, eat some more and of course laugh a lot.

So the dilemma........ Char and I have been looking into doing a sampler quilt. Choosing which one is our dilemma.

Char and I belong to the online Small Quilt Talk Group of Kathleen Tracy's. There was a huge interest in the group of the Dear Jane Sampler Quilt blocks.  Because of this, Kathleen Tracy started another on line group for Dear Jane quilt blocks.  After reading the reviews on this book, we pretty much chose not to do this one. One of the top complaints was that there were not enough instructions/templates available to complete the 225 blocks.

Another one that looked to be interesting was The Farmer's Wife Quilt Sampler.  This looked to have a lot of the traditional blocks that we would be interested in, but again, read some bad reviews on templates, and not all blocks have instructions.

The next two quilt sampler books may be more in line to what we are looking for.  They are both by Jennifer Chiaverini and both books had ratings of mostly 5 stars.  They are both in her Elm Creek series of books; Sylvia's Bridal Sampler and Loyal Union Sampler. They both are listed as being user friendly, clear directions, and traditional blocks that we are looking for.

As soon as the weather clears around here, we are off for a road trip to the book store to exam probably all of them.  We are thinking that a sampler block quilt may be the perfect thing to work on in warmer months.....then come winter again, we can plan on assembling them into a quilt.  Oh, mind you, not this coming next winter, I am thinking winters down the road.  Any one of the Samplers we choose will have well over 100 blocks to make. LOL

If you are, or have been involved in making a Sampler Quilt, please leave a comment so we may be able to better decide what Sampler we might be interested in attempting to make.

Thanks for stopping by.............

Sharon