Hello I’m Caroline (@casperbrigg) and welcome to my next blog. I can’t believe we are on block 6 already. Half way through! Half a quilt’s worth of blocks. I’m really enjoying the process and I can’t recommend the subscription for the Patchwork and Quilting Club enough. It’s done in bite size pieces. Each block on its own is not overwhelming and it’s very satisfying seeing the pile of blocks grow over the (half) year.
Needless to say, the contents of the box never disappoint. This box includes the gorgeous Lewis and Irene fabric from the Evergreen collection scattered with squirrels and other woodland creatures, the bumbleberry background fabric, a coordinating thread, printed instructions and a sweet treat. I love the warm browns and burnt oranges of this collection.
Now to the block, the friendship star. I have done a number of friendship stars before so I decided to try version 2 which has 2 stars rotating around the central square in opposite directions. I chose to fussy cut some of the fabrics to give a nice placement of some of the creatures. I also swapped the darkest fabric to be the central square and was pleased to get all 3 creatures in. Then I started cutting the lightest fabric for the 4 corner squares and the half square triangles (HSTs). It was half way through cutting these that I discovered there wasn’t enough space on the fabric to fussy cut. I had the 2 large squares for the HSTs and 2 smaller squares for the corner pieces, but now not enough fabric to even unfussy cut 2 more corner squares. I found this so frustrating and kicked myself for not planning my cutting better. In the end I decided to use the squares I had as the corner squares and cut out 2 more squares from the background fabric to make the HSTs. Phew, saved the day (or block)!
Once the HSTs are sewn the next step is the stitch and flip of the small squares to make the points of the second star. After lots of practice on previous blocks I think I now have the stitch and flip technique down. I made sure to draw a line on the back of each square and followed it closely and slowly to make sure my stitching was accurate. I also laid them all out to make sure I was adding the square on to the same corner of each block, otherwise my star wouldn’t have worked.
With the star points made it was time to sew the block together. This was just like sewing a basic 9 patch with 3 rows of 3 squares all roughly the same size. It went together really quickly and fairly easily, though I have stretched one of the seams while stitching the rows together which won’t quite lie as flat as I’d like.
All in all, I’m really pleased with this block and it looks stunning. Switching the background fabric for the HSTs worked really well, probably because it was so similar in colour to the fabric I was going to use. Next time I’m going to check I have enough fabric to do fussy cutting before putting blade to fabric, I’m sure that will be a lot less stressful.
Please join me again next time for Block 7. You can also follow my sewing journey on Instagram where I am @casperbrigg.