Labor Day Madness | nickelquilts

Quilt retreats are tons of fun and Nickel Quilts are a perfect project to work on at retreats, whether they are in a group workshop or as an individual project.

The Heartland Quilters Guild in Columbia, Illinois choose my Combination Unit workshop in which seven different quilts can be worked on, all in the same workshop.

The quilt chosen by the most participants was Labor Day Stars; it is an individual pattern and can be purchased on my website. When making the Combination unit my way we end up with mirror image units and the Labor Day Stars quilt uses both of these units in the same quilt. We create stars spinning in two different directions. When the quilt is assembled there will be sashing between the blocks to help camouflage the fact that the star points sometimes would line up perfectly and other times would be off by about an inch and a half!

Here are blocks by three different workshop participants, do you see the left spinning and right spinning stars?

This quilter decided on a little bit scrapper look. That’s one of the things that I love about my designs, they can be controlled with fewer fabrics for those who don’t like scrap quilts or are just not comfortable going really scrappy or they can be super scrappy!

A few others in the class chose Labor Day Madness and the Pinwheel quilt to make. Instructions for these quilts can be found in Nickel Quilts or The Big Book of Nickel Quilts. With these two quilts we use one of the mirror image units in the Labor Day Madness quilt and the other unit in the Pinwheel quilt.

Here are four Labor Day Madness blocks and four pinwheel blocks. Notice that this quilter used three different pinwheel variations.