New Orleans House Project

Thursday, July 16, 2015

Leaders or Enders?

I was a relative late-comer to the concept of using leader-ender projects to increase one's quilt-making output.  I never used the leader-ender practice when piecing, mostly because I never saw the need for it.  But when Bonnie Hunter promoted the idea of working on two quilts at the same time - one as the "main" quilting project, the other as a leader-ender project - I was sold!  Now I feel guilty if I do any stitching and don't use leader-enders as part of the process.

The Queen of Leader-Endering - Bonnie Hunter - has announced this year's L-E quilt along will be Tumblers.  I didn't really want to jump on the bandwagon because I have other quilty ideas in mind that will work just as well as leader-enders.  But Diane of Butterfly Threads blogged about her Tumblers AND her great Tumbler templates and I started weakening.

I rationalized that I already had some Tumbler pieces cut and ready to go. 

Inspired by Karen at Nana Girl Quilts, I had cut a stack of Tumbler pieces several months ago.  I had finished making memory quilts from my late father's shirt collection, but I had way too much shirt fabric left over to just toss the remainders (the fabric is mostly poly-cotton blends, so I didn't want to mix the left-overs into my regular fabric stash).  Karen inspired me to make a Tumbler quilt to use up more of the shirt fabrics; I had started cutting pieces, but hadn't progressed any farther.

I've done some tentative piecing of the Tumbler parts, but I'm not sure there's enough color variety in my shirt fabrics for a successful quilt.  I'm trying to decide if I want to throw in some random scraps of cotton quilting fabrics that were also used in the memory quilts.  I don't have any of the scraps cut in Tumbler shapes yet, so I guess my next step is to do some more cutting.  BTW, I'm using a Fons & Porter Wedge Template because it was the only ruler I could find at Hancock's when I first started cutting Tumbler pieces several months ago.

I'm still undecided about whether I'll use this as a leader-ender project, but I think a little more experimentation will be a good thing!