Farmers' Wife Sampler

This book - and the companion Farmer's Wife 1930s Sampler book - have been in my book shelf for several years.  I've read through the wonderful little stories, and dreamed of making the blocks for a beautiful scrappy vintage looking quilt. But it hasn't happened - yet.

BTW - the stories are actually excerpts from letters submitted for a contest in 1922.  The question was "Do you want your daughter to marry a farmer?"  I grew up as a town kid and did marry a farmer in 1977.  We spent 10 years trying to scratch out a living on his family farm.  I have wonderful memories of those years, and some not-so-wonderful memories too.  

Actually I did make 7 of the blocks as "test" blocks using some of my 1930s scraps.  Each block is only 6" square and very cute on its own, but they mostly would never work together because of the fabrics I used at the time.   I found them tucked into the 1930s book and here they are laid out on my table.  I'm thinking I'll use them to make some mug rugs, or some other small projects.   

But a small closed Facebook group I follow is going to do a sew-along beginning March 1, using this book.  I'm so excited!!  I got started with this little group of quilters when they were working through Lori Holt's Farm Girl Vintage book a few years ago.   It was really fun to share our progress each week.  The leader will post 2 Farmer's Wife blocks per week to make, which is very manageable.  And she plans to pair up blocks that use the same templates whenever possible.  My plan currently is to use some of the left over Kim Diehl fabrics that I've been hoarding.  I think those will make a wonderful quilt as the fabric lines all play so nicely with each other.  And the fabrics have a vintage look. 

One of the challenges of these books is that they use templates - which would have been historically appropriate, but isn't going to happen with me.  The templates are all on a CD in the back of the book.  I even had many of them already printed. LOL.  I noticed that on some of the templates I had written the actual size of the squares, rectangles, and triangles so I could just rotary cut them.  A few blocks use some strange shapes and for those I'll probably use the templates. 

What is it about planning a new project that gets me so excited?  Maybe I'm better at planning than I am at completing.