Benartex Block Hop Quilt
So I had the best of plans for this post to go up at the end of May (May 31st at the latest). The block hop would be over by then and I should have the quilt fully finished. Well, I got part way there. All the blocks were made, if you were following me on Instagram you would have seen them, and I even had the top designed and put together. The quilting is where everything started to go wrong (doesn’t it always!) I started quilting the quilt in a very pale blue (you can’t see it in the photos, but trust me up close you can tell it is pale blue, not gray or cream) and the spool of thread I was using kept snapping. And when I say kept snapping I mean after every block, so incredibly frustrating! So at a certain point I had to stop before I did something I would really regret (those shears were about to get a work out). Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your perspective, I had quilted about half the quilt at this point, and with the dense quilting I had no desire to unpick the whole thing. At this point the May deadline was here and gone.
June starts- I had a bunch of deadlines for projects that I can’t talk about (yet!), so the quilt went on a bit of a back burner while I finished everything up and tried to figure out how to solve the snapping thread issue. For those wondering it was the upper thread, and yes I had checked tension. I really think that the spool just had a fault, and the thread hadn’t been spun at the right tension so it had weak points. But the solution I decided on was trying a new spool of thread, when I could finally get my hands on one. In the end this worked (which is why I really think the other spool had a fault), and I was able to finish the rest of the quilting. It took a fraction of the time without the thread constantly snapping, which left me in a much better mood and much happier with the results. (It's amazing the extent to which your experience with a project can influence how you view the final product).
All of this means that I didn’t end up writing the blog post I intended to write, or even write it when I intended to write it, but I think this might be a more valuable post in the long run. Life rarely goes to plan- there are always issues (and sometimes we snap just like the thread), but putting something away and coming back to it later can help you to find the right solution and then be far happier with the results. Now I don’t recommend taking this approach with health issues (in that case keep advocating for yourself), but for so many other things it can work, like with career changes, relocation and more.
*Now for something fun (and free!) I had intended to include this in the original blog post.
Pattern for my block in the Benartex Spring 2026 Block Hop. Download Here.
Basic Pattern for the ombre sashing and backing that I used for putting my blocks together. Download Here.
