Facets: Rubies, Emeralds, and Sapphires
My Jane journey began rather naively on January 17, 2004. I hadn't even been aware of the quilt until the day before. Blossom Quiltworks was offering a Dear Jane club and I thought, "I need a new project and that sounds interesting." I bought the software instead of the book. I read all the information that the software had to offer and joined Blossom's club. I decided early on that I would make the blocks in reds, greens, and blues. And I found as I made each block that it was like a precious jewel so I named the quilt Facets: Rubies, Emeralds, & Sapphires. I was hooked. I set a goal to make all 225 blocks in a year. To do that I had to make more than one every two days.
For those Dear Jane techies:
The square blocks are 4 1/2" square. The triangles are 6 1/3" x 10". Changing the size with the Dear Jane® CD Rom was easy. The finished size is 102 1/2" square.
I bought about 12 yards of background fabric. It was adequate but I am a very conservative cutter. If you are paper piecing this may not be enough.
I used 57 different red, green, and blue fabrics - 19 of each color. I bought fat quarters and with only about 3 exceptions each piece made 3 square blocks, 1 triangle or kite block, and 1 solid triangle. And even though I fussy cut many blocks I had enough left over to make a lap quilt for a friend called Facets Remix and a miniature stacking blocks wallhanging.)
Since my block layout was on point, I did have to redesign some of the blocks to look good on point.
The quilt is completely hand pieced and hand quilted.
I finish piecing the 225 blocks in just under a year. I took a break from that project to make the lap quilt mentioned above. Then I went back and put all the blocks together to finish the top. That was November 2005. I dreaded basting the large quilt but finally learned that a long arm quilter will do that job. Glory. It took just over a year to hand quilt. I finished in September 2007.