I have had many questions regarding my Scrappy Fence Rail Quilt that I shared last Friday. So I thought I would take a post to share a bit more about it and hopefully answer your questions.

First of all, I was asked what I meant by leaders/enders. Bonnie Hunter has a great explanation on her site here. She has written a couple books on this topic as well. Basically, I would sew a pair of rectangles together at the beginning and end of each seam while working on a different project. I do this instead of leaving long thread tails that have to be trimmed later. I could sew on and off of the same scrap of fabric over and over, but then I just end up with something that gets thrown away. If I have a bunch of pieces cut, I am actually making progress on a project as well as saving thread and trimming.

For this project, I sewed pairs of rectangles together to get squares like this:

After I had a pile of these, I would take a break from the other project I was working on and made a block or two like  this:

It was important to orient the lights and darks in the same way for each block. Each rectangle was cut at 2 by 3 1/2 inches. I used my die cutter for this. Here is the die I used:

I made 49 blocks and added a 6 inch border so that my quilt top ended up 96 inches square. The majority of the fabrics here are Civil War repros.
I used the same die for the scrappy rectangles quilt I finished last summer.

No Civil War fabrics there! In this case, I chose anything that was NOT Civil War repro fabric. This quilt was put together essentially the same way as the Fence Rail quilt. However, each block was pieced with all the rectangles in the same orientation.

Here is a picture of a single block:

I hope this helps! Have a great day!