Yesterday I took a careful measurement of the hourglass blocks I made and discovered some of them were just too far off - yeooww! Trying to sew those little pieces accurately was tricky, at least for me. Those little rascals kept slipping and sliding, not a good scenario for bias cut fabric! I like the specialty ruler but maybe I'll save it for larger cuts?
Out of the 10 blocks I made, I was able to salvage 6 of em... the rest will go into my parts department bin. These are the rescued ones...
Mr. Cool made the cut, yes!!!
To make my life easier, I decided to make the oversized HST blocks, cross cut and sew again... you know what I mean! I know the instructions say to cut a 3-1/2 or 3-3/4" square, but to make my life easier I just cut a 4" square and kept on going! Does it waste a little fabric? Yep! Does it matter? Nope, not when I'm trying for accuracy!
I drew a diagonal line, sewed 1/4" on either side, cut on the drawn line to make two HST, yadda yadda yadda. Then I mated two different ones black-to-neutral, resewed and cut.
I went from this...
to this...
26 hourglass blocks done! There are still 19 HST block sets to be sewn together, to yield 38 hourglass blocks.
To make the final trim I used the 45-degree line on my ruler placed directly on a seam line, lined up the seam intersection at 1-1/4" from the edge (half of the required 2-1/2" finished size) and trimmed. Then I turned it a half-turn and made a vertical trim at 2-1/2" wide. Confused yet?
Simply put, I trimmed the side with the circles w/my ruler's 45-degree line on the seam line, turned the piece around and trimmed the other edge to make the block 2-1/2" wide, then did the same thing to the top and bottom edges. Hey, it worked for me!
I knew I might have a problem with color when I used the "romantic" fabric, and maybe also the reindeer fabric.
Sometimes you don't know til you recut and resew... in this case the blocks below were sorta iffy, so I'll put them aside for now...
not quite enough black showing to qualify!
I like my scrappy neutrals but I also like what some people are doing with just white-and-black fabric for their neutrals. I'm not particularly fond of the fabric above with the large balls, I'll keep what I've done but I won't use any more of that one. Also, that piece with the music score sheets? and the blue recipe on white background? I'll eliminate those too! The musical score looks a bit grey at that small size.
Be sure to visit the Orca Bay linky at Quiltville to see what other people are doing!
Sew forth and sew on
very nice blocks, so only 175 to go???? or so? some cool and funky fabrics too!
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