Hooray Hooray! I can finally tell you a bit about the blog-land quilt along! It started with one simple concept: “Take something very traditional and put a modern spin on it.”? I think that is the concept behind many modern quilts/quilters.

This concept was a Row Robin. Do you know what a Row Robin is? It is a quilt made in, usually, horizontal rows and each row is a different style or type. Many times ladies would pass the quilt along to the next person in the group and add a row. The quilt would continue to be passed around until it arrived back to the original owner- with all sorts of surprises- from fabric, to design, to technique. It is really a neat idea. Round Robin quilts are done this way, around a center medallion quilt.

So using this idea as the jumping off point I thought-

1. Let’s make sure the rows are modern and hip.
2. Let’s have the quilter be able to customize the row or quilt size.
3. Let’s do our own sewing, so we’re certain the pieces/colors will be pleasing at the end.

Then I was stumped- How can I make a Row Robin look sampled and varied while still stitching the thing myself??? A-HA! I contacted 4 other modern sewing bloggers with the idea. Each blogger designed one row and wrote a tutorial for it. Very cool, right?? Each week, the 5 Row Robin bloggers will show you their own stitched row design and link you to the blog tutorial for that row. We want to keep each new row a surprise, just like a traditional Row Robin, so hold on to your hats!

So once the idea was literally ironed out, we needed a fun funky name for our quilt-along. We opted to go with Rockin’ Robin, since this quilt will ROCK! The row sizes given will yield a 48″ x 60″ baby quilt. Of course, as with most modern, some-what improvised designs, you can easily make this quilt larger, simply by making the rows longer or making some rows twice. (That will affect your fabric requirements, you know.)

Wanna meet the bloggers?? (These links will go to the row construction tutorials on each? blog, as they go live.)

Row 1- Lisa Marie from That Crazy Quilty Girl
Row 2- Melissa from Lilac Lane
Row 3- Heather and Megan from Quilt Story
Row 4- Anne Marie of Gen X Quilters
Row 5-Jen at ReannaLily Designs Blog (me!)

The first row design goes live on July 5th and we’ll have another one every Monday for 5 weeks. Start collecting a nice background fabric and a pile of focus fabrics. I think my quilt top ended up using about 3 yards of background and an assortment of Kaffe prints, probably totaling somewhere around 2 yards.

We will be sharing our different colorways and row variations in our flickr group and add the Rockin’ Robin Quilt Along button to your blog. Hang on for the ride!

Updated to add:? The Rockin Robin Quilt along has PRIZES!!!? Thank you to our sponsors for making this a great quilt-along event. Read more about the prizes, how to win, and eligibility here.