Welcome to Week 5 of Blockheads 5, Group 2! We’re so excited to have Janet Clare as our featured designer this week. Janet’s fabric collections often feature prints taken straight from her art journals and include watercolors, indigo ink doodles, and nature- and nautical-inspired imagery. Bluebell is her latest collection to arrive in shops and features floral cyanotypes layered with sheet music, lace, and a vintage calligraphy script in summery shades of blue and soft greens. Look for Bluebell fabrics in your favorite quilt shop now!

You can find this week’s pattern here: BH5 – Group 2, Block 5 – Glimmer by Janet Clare

Follow along with Janet!
Instagram: @janeteclare
http://www.janetclare.co.uk/home.htm

If you’re new to Blockheads, here are a couple of quick things to know:

• This is a free quilt-along. No sign-ups are required. Just download the pattern and you’re ready to sew!
• The PDF patterns will be posted on the Moda blog and in the official Facebook group every Wednesday by 8:00 AM CDT.
• You can also bookmark this page: Blockheads 5 main page to find a convenient list of all the patterns as they are released.
• If you’d like to sign up for our blog newsletter to get blog posts delivered to your inbox, you can sign up here: Blog Newsletter Sign-Up
• If you want to sew along with a virtual Blockheads community, head over to Facebook and join our official Moda Blockheads Facebook group. Our group is an active and vibrant community of 72,000 quilters and counting! It’s a great place to be inspired and share pictures of your Blockheads progress.
• If Instagram is where you prefer to hang out, be sure to follow us (@modafabrics) and the hashtags #modablockheads and #modablockheads5 to see the latest blocks from our designers and other Blockheads.
• Be sure to get your official Blockheads t-shirts, sweatshirts, tote bags, water bottles, and more from our pop-up shop HERE.

(Looking for a little more information about Blockheads? You can check out the Blockheads 5 archive HERE.)

Something new we’re planning for this round of Blockheads is a weekly video. You can follow along with me as I sew the block of the week and share my tips and tricks and talk about different construction techniques. I’ll post the videos on YouTube and share them here on the blog. You can watch this week’s video below:

I’m excited to share a new-to-me ruler in this week’s video that takes the guesswork out of fabric cutting for four-at-a-time flying geese! The Lazy Girl Designs Flying Geese x 4 ruler is a great shortcut ruler for cutting fabrics to make four-at-a-time flying geese without having to reference a cutting chart or calculator. All you need to know is the finished size that you want for your flying geese. Simply follow the lines on the ruler – they are marked according to the finished size of your flying geese – to cut a large square and four smaller squares for your flying geese.

So when does this come in handy? Well, if you have a pattern that calls for two HSTs side-by-side, but you’d rather make a flying geese unit to reduce the number of seams, you can use the Flying Geese x 4 ruler to cut your fabrics – no cutting chart needed.

Or if you are working with a pattern that uses the stitch & flip method of making flying geese, but you’d rather make four-at-a-time flying geese, this ruler will let you do that without having to figure out the math!

It’s a handy ruler that you can also use for HSTs and QSTs. I hope you’ll try it out! I think you’ll find that it’s a great addition to your quilting toolkit.

In this week’s video, I also share some tips for working with directional prints when making flying geese, and I’ll walk you through trimming down oversized flying geese so that you’ll never lose a point – without needing a Bloc Loc ruler!

Are you ready to see our blocks?

Lissa is using Nantucket Summer for her blocks.

Alison is making a fall version in 12” blocks and a patriotic version in 6” blocks. I just love the fabrics she chose for her blocks this week!

And I am making a traditional/repro scrappy fall version and a sweet/cottage-y Americana version in 6” blocks.

Now…off you go to press, cut, and sew! And don’t forget to share your blocks with us in our Facebook group or on Instagram (#modablockheads5)!