Modern quilters, meet traditional design.

In 2011, Faith of Fresh Lemons Quilts, Lee Heinrich of Freshly Pieced and myself had a simple goal: Show modern quilters how they can use traditional block designs. It seems crazy now, but at the time there wasn’t a lot online with that focus. To our delight, there was plenty of interest in combining those two genres, and the result was the 2011 Summer Sampler Quilt-Along.

You can purchase the instructions for all 12 Summer Sampler 2011 blocks as one convenient, printable PDF. The 86-page PDF also includes some exclusive PDF-only content such as a mini-lesson in value and color placement.

In 2021, we decided to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of the Summer Sampler, and hosted a Summer Sampler Turns 10 Quilt Along—the updated tutorials are also linked below.

Fabric requirements:
• The equivalent of about 1/4 yard for each block, so about 3 yards of fabric total
• If you plan to use the same background color for every block, we recommend about 2 yards of background fabric, plus 8-12 fat eighths in various colors/prints

Finishing instructions:
Simple finishing instructions will be available on this website on May 12, 2021. In addition, the finishing instructions from any of our other Summer Sampler patterns (2016-2020) are easily adaptable to these blocks.