1) The Basics

Our process for building One Block Wonder (hereafter known as OBW) quilts is based heavily on a series of books by Maxine Rosenthal. Maxine's books do a great job of describing the process of choosing the fabric, aligning the pattern, cutting the triangles, and assembling the quilt. Additional books in Maxine's series cover the topics of adding cubes, blocks and possibly even other fabric elements to enhance the quilts.

We've done over two dozen OBW quilts (and counting...). We continue to use the basics laid out by Maxine. They work very well, and we have found no reason to modify them.

What we bring to the process is our approach to fabric selection and the design of the quilt. We choose NOT to try and force the design in a direction the fabric does not want to go. This makes the process of fabric selection a bit more critical to us. There are many fabrics out there that will make a very nice OBW quilt, but may require some sort of additional "tweeking" to really get a quilt that makes a statement. This desire to make the quilt only from the original fabric also adds some challenges in the assembling of the triangles. We will often choose an arrangement that is not necessarily our favorite because we know the favorite one may be TOO prominent, and will stand out too much in the field of the quilt.

To us, this is where the excitement comes in. We're getting better at looking at a fabric and seeing whether or not it will make a "good" design choice, but we're constantly surprised when the final product never looks like we thought it would. When we break our own rules, and try to force the pattern to look like something specific, we're always disappointed with the results. More often than not, we tear it down and rebuild it.

Some Opening Comments...