I’m going to miss the September meeting of the Cincinnati Modern Quilt Guild when we will show off our third Travel Quilt blocks and get our blocks for the fourth round. So I worked ahead a bit and made blocks for these last two rounds in August.

The block above is one I made for Ellen’s quilt. The original block she provided was pieced with curved strips (it’s peeking out from under my block below), and she suggested the theme of “movement” for the rest of the blocks. Kay made the white strip at the top of the image below, and Kim made the pinwheel block on the left.

The flying geese block I made is called Follow the Leader, and it’s from the book Modern Blocks by Susanne Woods. This book is my go-to for projects like this, as there are 99 blocks, all with very different looks. I did learn, however, that flying geese are really hard for me to make when I’m not paper piecing them. I think I sewed more than half of these guys twice to get the points close to right.

Ellen provided a lot of fabric for us to use, so the look of her blocks is very cohesive. (I added a couple fabrics from my stash, just to put a little of my own stamp on my block.) I can’t wait to see what she comes up with for her final quilt!

The other block I worked on was one for Teresa. Her original block was squares and rectangles grouped by color with a bit of white mixed in. So these are the blocks I made for her.

I had planned to sew them together into one 12.5 x 12.5-inch block. But then I started playing with them a bit. I noticed that one would fit perfectly with this little plus that Ellen made.

And they matched up nicely with the blocks Kim made.

And I really liked the way they look with Teresa’s original block.

So I’ve given the pieces to Teresa, and I’ll wait to see what she decides to do with them.

Those are the last two blocks I’ll be making for my group’s Traveling Quilt journey (see block 1 here and block 2 here). I was a bit nervous about joining in on this challenge, but I ended up enjoying the process of building on what someone else had started. I admit that not all of the blocks I made were super successful, so if they don’t appear in a finished quilt, I’ll be OK with that. But the process itself was a fun challenge.

In November, I’ll be getting my shark block back along with the blocks the other people in my group made for me. I can’t wait! And I’ll be sure to show them here.