I am new at quilting and am working on a shawl for a lady at work that is going through breast cancer treatments. I have cut all the pieces out and made one block so far. My question to you ladies n gents is this...do you sew a to b then add c and then d e f and so forth or do you grab all the a & b's and sew them together, iron then sew all the c's to the a/b's iron, then add all the rest. If that makes any sense at all! I am just curious how everyone does them. I have bee lurking and reading several times a day here and love seeing everyones quilts and seeing the quilting rooms.

Bobbi

Bobbi:

I first want to say bravo for making a quilt for someone with cancer, what a wonderful thing for you to do.

Now to answer your question, is not so simple as one would think. Some patterns require sewing one block at a time, while I have found others can be "chained" together to sew the blocks, I think others will agree. If you try to chain them and it works well, I see no reason not to, but as previously stated, sometimes it's just not possible. Do what works best for you.

Hope that makes sense.

I usually do one block to make sure it goes together the way it's supposed to and to see if I like the colors and all together. That's the time to make any changes. After that, I sometimes do "assembly line" sewing as you have indicated. It always seems very slow to me (I do like instant gratification of blocks completed), but when I have a lot of blocks done at the same time I'm happy! Hope this makes sense and helped.

Depends on how easily confused you are! LOL! I usually chain piece, but sometimes I just chain piece the parts of one block. I don't do parts to other blocks or I might accidently sew the wrong part into the wrong block. But I have done scrappy where it doesn't matter which a/b combo went into which block, just as long as there was an a/b combo. Make sense?

Try it both ways and see which works best for you. That's the right way.

The shawl is only 8 blocks, but I wondered about some of the quilts that have 20 or more blocks. I put the first block together like it said to in the pattern. It went by pretty fast and it looked great. So the rest I just did all the a/b together then the ab/c and so on. Thanks for the comments and encouragements. I'll post a picture when I get it done.
Bobbi

What a wonderful answer! Love it!

Yep, Eleanor Burns of Quilt in a Day puts her blocks together going down the length of the quilt, me, i go across for some reason. both ways work.