Part 1- here,                  Part 2- here,                         Part 3- here,                      Part 4- here

At last I have finished my quilt blocks! Or finished them as much as I plan to- we’ll get to that in a minute.

Drunkard’s Path block-

I really enjoyed this block. The original block from our class had a smaller circle but I wanted a different look so I enlarged the template circle a bit and am so excited that it turned out. I went on Pinterest to look up ideas for this block so check out my quilts board if you want to see other ways this can be used. I love how with just moving the blocks around, you can totally change the look of this block. I feel confident about sewing curved seams now. The only thing I didn’t like about the block was that it requires LOTS of pinning so it becomes quite time-consuming: difficult when your sewing time is limited to a toddler’s nap time.

Dresden Plate block

This block was our practice in applique. I have been doing quite a bit of applique recently so this was a review, but I enjoyed putting it together. I opted out of hand-appliqueing for time’s sake and did a straight stitch around all the edges. MUCH faster and I still like the effect though I do prefer a hand-applique look for a block like this. I used a freezer paper template for the center circle and even with this template, I had a hard time getting my circle completely round- but I’ve determined not to stress out about small imperfections!

Tumbling block

Ah…this block. What can I say about it? I spent much time painstakingly cutting out tiny diamonds, sewing said diamonds together, and mastering the y-seam, only to have to scrap this block for now. 😦 I was really happy with how this block was turning out as I was sewing my diamonds together. This y-seam thing wasn’t hard at all, I thought to myself. And then I began to sew the rows to each other. I just could not get them to work! The seams were so far off that in no way were they ever going to meet and I would have to resew all the individual rows to try to fix the problem. I also realized that my template was so tiny, I was going to have to make twice as many little blocks to fill my 18 inch big block. So, I scrapped it for now. We had 10 blocks built into the class, and I only need 9 for my quilt top so it wasn’t a big deal to opt out of it. I would like to revisit this block at some point and learn how to make it correctly because I love the visual effect it gives. Here’s my instagram shot of my progress.

Now that all my blocks were finished, I had to decide on sashing and borders.  I was going to do a sashing between my blocks but the only solid I have on hand to match is a very dark grey, and I didn’t think it would look good so I decided to put them together with no sashing. However I am going to do a 6 inch border of the dark grey. I got as far as sewing all the blocks together tonight and will work on the border and backing tomorrow. I am pretty excited because tomorrow’s class begins the discussion of free motion quilting- something I very much want to learn!