Tuesday, June 4, 2013

This block drove me nuts!

I looks like a simple enough block.  Squares and triangles except for the one long green piece that occurs 4 times, once in each quarter of the block.  I figured "no sweat - I'll just cut a rectangle, then fold back the paper foundation to cut the angle of the attached triangle.  Figured I could do this in less than two hours - no problem, right?

3-4:  Robbers
Wrong!  Two things are happening here that tend to give me fits.  Primarily, it is not a symmetrical block.  Trying to reverse it in my brain so it looks like the foundations is something I've never been able to do well.  See that large brown triangle?  Took me at least 3 tries before being convinced that the hypotenuse didn't go in either of the places I was trying to put it while sewing on this triangle.

Secondly, it involves fairly large half-square and quarter-square triangles.  I know my triangle math - add 7/8" for half square triangles and 1 1/4" for quarter square triangles when figuring the cutting sizes.  I figured adding an extra quarter-inch more on each leg was enough.  Wrong!  I needed to add at least 1/2" in order for the triangles to be big enough in all directions.  Especially on quarter-square triangles.  So all but the smallest triangles were barely big enough, and had to be placed perfectly to give adequate seam allowance on all edges.  Needless to say, placing them perfectly was almost impossible.  I did so much ripping that my poor paper foundations were falling apart.  I didn't want to waste fabric by cutting bigger pieces, so instead I wasted several hours.  I did recut several pieces towards the end - I just wanted it to be over.

And now that it is over, I did some investigating in Electric Quilt.  Low and behold - it is possible to make a mirror image when printing foundation papers.  It would have helped so much on a few of the blocks I've already finished.  At least I know it now for all the rest of them!

I figured I could finish this second row easily today, but now I'm not sure.  I really want to, so I can move on to another of this month's goals.

1 comment:

Tazzie said...

It's a gorgeous block Patti, your perseverance paid off. Isn't it funny how a simple looking block can often be a big headache.
Be sure to have a great week
*hugs*
Tazzie
:-)