Fellow Quilters,

My pile of completed blocks from the Time to Quilt quilt-along is growing!

My growing stacks of blocks

Doing 3 sets per day is keeping me hopping.  Have you been keeping up with me?  I know some of you have, because I’ve seen photos of your blocks.  Have you tried the easy block assembly tip I gave you in the Block 6 pattern and shown in the photos in my blog post for Block 7?  I’m interested in your feedback – it’s so much easier to show something in a live demo than using step-by-step photos or just words.  By the way, this assembly method is applicable for most of the 24 blocks in the quilt-along, so if you’re only on Block 2 or 3 you can still use it.  Trust me – I did!

So, for Block 8 I actually followed the original pattern to the letter.  Yup, no changes, just the addition of the make-it-mini and super-size versions and the block layout diagram.  Once again I had just a couple of scraps of one of the fabrics for the Midsommar version so I purposely chose this block for this fabric, knowing that I could manage to get all the required pieces from my 2 bits of red fabric.

2 small scraps of red for my Midsommar version

One of the Shimmer fabrics is a stripe – how fun!  I love using stripes in my quilts – they add an element of interest – however sometimes we might want to select how we use them.  Sometimes I want to manage the direction of the stripe to control how the finished block looks.  Let me explain.

In this block the stripe fabric is used in the B squares and also in the A half-square triangles.  If we draw the diagonal line in the same direction on all the stripe A pieces our quilt blocks will look like this.

The stripe fabric in the half-square triangle units is not in a consistent direction in the blocks

I would prefer if my blocks look like this.

The stripe fabric in each unit is in a consistent orientation – I like this better.

How can I manage this?

Today’s tip:  Knowing that half of my half-square triangle blocks would slope up to the left and half would slope up to the right, I drew half my lines sloping up to the left and the other half sloping up to the right.

I selected the orientation of my A pieces when drawing the line to make the half-square triangle units

Bingo!  I got the results I was looking for.

Once those half-square triangle units are done, this block goes together lickety-split.  I pressed the seams toward the B pieces and middle row, and we’re done!

Block 8 done 🙂

You can find my instructions for Block 8 here.

Did you see what Christina did with yesterday’s block on the FIGO Facebook post?  Her min quilt is fabulous!  Today Northcott has used scrumptious Shimmer for their block and Banyan’s block features Intaglio – lovely!  And be sure to check out Daphne’s blog post – she talks about how she designed the fabrics used in her block today.

See you tomorrow 😊

Patti