Blocks Galore

For the last couple of weeks I've had a temporarily homeless friend sleeping in my Studio. While it has been great having him around, it has meant that I don't have anywhere to get stuck into a sewing project and leave it in progress.

The solution?

A truly massive project in twenty little bites - Craftsy's Block of the month 2012 The class walks me through a total of twenty blocks, so watching the video then sewing one (or two) blocks using the techniques taught in the video is a manageable project that I can clear away in time for my house guest to go to bed.

I'd already tackled January and one of the February blocks, but the other February block was a bit challenging. I thought I'd got the half square triangles sorted but the first block only used half square triangles. I didn't realise that I had ended up making them a little larger, but when I came to include plain blocks in the design it was rather obvious:

It took a lot of shoving, heaving and swearing to get the pattern looking right, but the seams are far from perfect. I'm kind of hoping that once it's all quilted and drowned in a sea of other, far better blocks, that I won't notice this one (Like, who am I kidding - it'll be the first one I notice)

Once I'd done that I moved on to Amy's string blocks, and they were fun. Her instructions were to use random strips of fabric of differing widths. I'm not sure how random mine were. In essence they were all the width of my long ruler, but I started off with plain black because I really like the look of the star so I wanted it to stand out. From then on in it was random, and I figured that it didn't matter if they didn't line up perfectly, since they were supposed to be random.

I was sooo pleased with myself at actually getting a star shape in the middle, I decided to be even more ambitious for the second string block and try and make it deliberately uniform.  It took a total of twelve seams, stiching and unstitching to get this lined up, and I’ve now decided that, although the seams line up pretty perfectly, it still looks random, just ‘cos of the nature of the prints.

 

Mind you, I’ve now done six blocks and am getting a feel for what the finished quilt will look like:

I think I like it.  They are now all pegged up on my studio wall, even when the house guest is in there. I'm sure he'll tell me if it gives him a headache.