Easter Week Palm Quilts: Day 2

Day Two of more Palm quilts. But did you ever think about WHY this is called the Palm block? The Hosannah Block? If you've ever been in church the week before Easter you may have seen a procession of little Sunday School kids come up the church aisle waving palm leaves and singing some Easter chorus. They are acting out the historical re-enactment of when Jesus rode into town on a donkey and the crowds were waving palm branches. Do you remember that?

Doesn't matter. The Palm block is one of my favorites. It's easy to make using paper piecing. Here is my master and a stack of newsprint stapled together so I can make multiple copies using "needle punch" with my sewing machine.

And what it looks like with fabric attached:

Just four blocks to make up this quilt. I proposed it for my 3rd book but it didn't make the cut.

Casablanca Palms from 2011

I used an older collection to make a single block into a pillow. It looks pretty saucy there, standing upright like that. I love using blues with yellow! I think this is a 7" block (or it could be a 10" block). The pillow is long gone, living with some other family.

If you do a search here on my blog for "Palm" or "Hosannah" you'll see all sorts of tutorials and steps for making these blocks.

One last quilt for today involves a quilt I made for Windham Fabrics and their Regency Dandy collection in 2006. A 9 Block quilt with a lot of different prints. I absolutely loved this quilt and held onto it for several years. Then I gave it to a neighbor who had surgery and I wanted to cheer her up.

Regency Dandy Hosannah Quilt. 10" blocks. 60" x 60"

Now, you may be thinking about this 10" size. How do I print this? Well, I've had a wide-format printer in my office for a few years, but it's also possible to draft this in a 4 by 4 grid. More on that later. Here's one of those blocks in a different print combination up close. NO diagonal seam. Look at it as though it's an off-center log cabin with the logs having sharp points. Now do you see it?

Check out that paper pattern at the top.

10" foundation pieced Hosannah block

When I teach my Palm workshops, I teach this using the 10" size. It's a LOT of cutting down 18" x 24" newsprint into 11" x 17" sheets. But it's fabulous to get to make such large blocks!