Chamomile QAL Week 1- Cutting

Welcome to the Chamomile Quilt Along! I am so excited about all of you sewing along with me, and a little nervous too. This is my first official quilt along for a pattern from my shop. Chamomile is a top 3 favorite and I'm so glad you are here to make one too!

It's never too late to join, you can grab the Chamomile Pattern in paper or digital form. And if you're still catching up:
Chamomile Introduction Post

This week is all about cutting fabric! There are essentially 3 way you can go about this:

1. Follow the pattern exactly. This gives you a majority of strips for faster piecing, and some squares to use to swap out and mix in fussy cuts if you'd like, or to just give it a scrappier touch. There's also a 1/2" margin for trimming space. I did it this way first time, and used lots of fussy cuts.

2. You can opt to not cut a square off the end of your strips, sew the strips together as directed (they will be longer) and get FIVE strip sets from each instead of four. This will make your block piecing even faster! I'm going to do it this way this time, mostly. I only have 2 little fussy cut squares to mix in.

Here I've got half on mine all ready to sew in sets of 4.

 3. You can go totally scrappy, cutting all 3.5" squares for the whole project. Sewing will take a little longer, but the result will be amazing! My neighbor friend @kimradair is doing it this way. You'll need 16 3.5" squares for each of the 20 blocks.

Special note: Some have asked if you can use precuts for this pattern. You can, if you alter it a bit. The best way to make the most of your precuts would be to use 36 2.5" squares for each block, sewing them together in a 6 by 6 grid to get the resulting 12" block. @sharita1 did it this way, and reduced the blocks to just 9 to make a baby quilt.

The sashing and cornerstone cutting are pretty straight forward. Be careful with those skinny strips! I don't have a Stripology Ruler, but if you have one of those it would be pretty nice to have for this part!

I am doing scrappy cornerstones so it's going to take much longer without the strip piecing, but I'm excited to use up some springy solid scraps.

A few people who have made this pattern have preferred to have the colored and white parts inverted on the cornerstones, like in the picture below by @sistersquiltshop. If you want to get that look, cut 6 WOF strips from your cornerstone color, so a quarter yard might be a very tight squeeze! This one is just gorgeous.

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments, and thank you for being here! I have loved seeing your fabric pulls over at #chamomileQAL, this is going to be SO GOOD! If you haven't posted your fabric or cutting or progress yet, be sure to do so to enter to win this weeks prize, which is a surprise from me :) Enter to win by posting to the #chamomileQAL hashtag some time before midnight PST on Sunday. After that we'll start in an all the awesome goodies from these ladies!