Farmer's Wife Friday 10

I managed to play a little catch up and finished three blocks this week. I even faced the dreaded paper piecing for one of the blocks. I know that there are a lot of quilters who are making all of the blocks using paper piecing, but it's still a method that I don't like using for quilting. For some weird reason I struggle to see how fabric will fold (even when I crease the paper and fold back the fabric and do all of the other hints that are supposed to make paper piecing so easy) and always end up having to redo at least one or two pieces. I realized that the Periwinkle block would either require adding extra seams or paper piecing so I sucked it up and did paper piecing. I'm not sure how much I like the black center, but when I was laying out all of the blocks I noticed a lot of them are really dark so I'm trying to balance things out a bit more.

#66 Periwinkle

I debated paper piecing Night and Day too, but when I was doing some research for this block I had someone recommend that the templates are easier. Elanor Burns has a tutorial for strip piecing and has made a really cool quilt from just this block, but I didn't want to buy a book for a single block. I ended up printing out the templates provided in the book and was pleased with how the block worked out.

#59 Night and Day

It was really bugging me to have an odd number of blocks. I've been enjoying focusing on the letters that accompany the blocks and haven't been able to do that as well when I have blocks from two different letters. Tall Pine Tree I was able to do with traditional rotary piecing. I did have a little trouble with half rectangle triangles. I don't know why I thought I could sew them like HSTs and have them work out, but let me assure you that sewing two lines diagonally across a rectangle does not give you two perfect rectangle triangles sewn together. I love that solids don't have a wrong side so it was a really easy thing to fix. I'm waiting to see how all of the blocks work together. I may go back and redo some of these blocks with color. If so this will be one of the blocks I redo and the tree will be green. I think my desire for color comes from the fact that I still haven't found the perfect shades of blue for the sashing and corner stones. I'm pretty sure when I find those fabrics I'll be able to get a good vision of this completed quilt and can decide if I want to add any more colors.

#94 Tall Pine Tree

22/111

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