The National Cherry Festival in Traverse City is a pretty big deal each year. Everyone is beginning the countdown of days just like we do when it gets close to the time for our Dear Jane Retreat in Shipshewana.

Cherry Festival days are filled with parades, pie eating contests, concerts, food tasting, air shows, bike tours, volleyball games, wine tasting, big wheel races, arts & craft show, classic car show, teddy bear tea, bubblegum blow, fireworks and so much more.

While Traverse City cherries are the main focus, it seems all things red and white become part of the celebration too. I thought it would be fun to have our own little celebration here at Sentimental Stitches and what better way to celebrate than with Midget Blocks!

This year's National Cherry Festival is July 2 - 9 so beginning today I'm posting new Midget Block patterns. There are several days until the start of Festival so Clutch and I can come up with quite a few new blocks between now and then.

I'm sure you remember me drooling all over my computer during the Infinite Variety exhibit of red and white quilts in New York a few months ago. I did more than my fair share of whining about the fact that I wasn't there. I've been thinking about starting a red & white quilt almost every day since then. Add to that Cherry Festival, your requests for new Midget Blocks and you get.... Midget Blocks - Red, White & You! How's that for a blending of ideas?

I'm surprised at how many of the Midget Blocks have red in them. Here's just a few.

I'll put a link to the pattern for each block in my post about it and on the the regular Midget Blocks page. I also created a Flickr Group for Midget Blocks - Red, White & You! so you can add pictures of red and white Midget Blocks you make so everyone can see our progress. I added pictures of some of my blocks to get us started.


The first new block is called Diamonds. It's one of those blocks you think is going to be difficult to piece but even with a few "Y" seams it went together easily.


Here it is in red and white fabrics. Believe it or not, this one is foundation pieced, "Y" seams and all! You'll have it done in no time. So without further ado, click on the text for your pattern.

Here's the setting I designed for this project. The finished size is 70" x 80". There are 143 blocks in the quilt. If you look this over closely you'll see where I used a couple of blocks twice - oops - have you ever done that? It will drive me crazy until I get out the seam ripper and do some 'frog stitching' to change it.
I'm using a wide variety of red prints, mostly 1930s reproduction fabrics. My background and sashing strips are an off white solid (Moda Bella Solids are my favorite). My cornerstones in the sashing are a red polka dot (no surprise there!) and I haven't decided if I'll use my scraps in the pieced border or just one fabric. If you think you want to make a quilt like mine you'll need at least 7 yards of background fabric and red prints totaling 11 yards. I know that sounds wild but the 11 yards is for your blocks, cornerstones and pieced border. In the next few days I'll break those numbers down for each section and create a PDF file you can print off for reference.

Moda Bella Solid Off White

Enjoy the new block and don't forget to post a picture of it in the Flickr Group for Midget Blocks - Red, White & You! so we all can see.