Four-patch Friday on Day 10 of Time to Quilt

Fellow Quilters,

Welcome to Day 10 of the Time to Quilt quilt-along!  Last night I finally found some time to tweak my quilt design for the super-size Shimmer option.  Shimmer is one of my all-time favorite Northcott collections so I was excited to use it for the quilt-along however, when I colored the quilt based on the template posted on the Northcott Facebook page a few days ago, the quilt didn’t look the way I expected.  Does that ever happen to you?  You make all the blocks for a quilt using that perfect selection of fabrics, then sew them into the quilt and…hmmm…ho-hum…another UFO.  As I mentioned on Day 1, my pieces of Shimmer might be a bit small to get all the required pieces for the blocks, so I was considering adding some solid black from Northcott’s ColorWorks.  I’m not changing any of the blocks that are already completed so I randomly recolored a few of the upcoming blocks.  Here is my original quilt design and the revised one with some black thrown into the mix.

My original quilt with no black in the blocks and my revised version with some black – it’s still a work-in-progress

Now, the blocks are not in their final placement – it would take waaaay too long to move them around in EQ – but I feel pretty confident that I’ve got a good mix now.  The addition of black background to some of them adds interest to the quilt.  So, what does this mean for your quilt?  If you are using sashing, you may want to replace one of the fabrics on some of the remaining blocks with some of your sashing fabric – or not!  The choice is yours.  We all have our own comfort level with how busy we want our quilts to look.  My Midsommar make-it-mini will look busier because there is no sashing to tone it down – I’m okay with that.  Some modern quilts ARE busy.

Block 10

For Block 10 I decided not to make any changes in the original pattern posted on Northcott’s, Banyan’s and FIGO’s Facebook/Instagram pages/feeds.  That’s 3 days in a row with no changes!  I could have eliminated 2 small seams however I weighed my options and decided that it was probably faster to make the block as originally patterned.  You see, everything but the center square is made from strip-pieced units, and strip-piecing is fast – sew a light strip to a dark strip, cross-cut into the required sizes and assemble the units.

Cross-cut the strip set to make 4-patch units

Today’s tip:  The corners of each block are made from units with 2 lights and 2 darks –  we call them 4-patch units.  We cut these from our strip-pieced units and sew 2 pieces together, stacking the light part of one piece on the dark part of the other piece.  To make this faster, let’s stack our strip sets this way to cut these pieces.

Stack 2 strip sets light-on-dark and dark-on-light to cut the pieces for the 4-patch units

Then when we pick them up off our cutting mat they are perfectly aligned and ready to be sewn together.

Tip #2:  Our seams will match better in these 4-patch units if we sew them with the seam of the top piece going away from us and the seam on the bottom piece coming toward us.

Sew with the top seam going AWAY from you and the bottom seam TOWARD you

Tip #3:  After sewing the 4-patch units, finger-press the seams all in one direction – clock-wise or counter-clock-wise, depending on the direction of the strip-pieced seams – and let the stitches in the seam allowance at the center become loose so you can spin the seams and press them flat.  This distributes the bulk from that center seam.

I pushed the seams in a counter-clockwise direction and let the stitches in the center pop undone to flatten the intersection

Once the 4-patch units are done, we assemble our blocks and we’re done.

Block 10 done 🙂

You can find my instructions for Block 10 here.

I have a short To Do list for your today:

1)  It’s Friday a.k.a. Prize Day so head on over to the Northcott Facebook page and post pictures of your blocks from this week.  You only have until midnight EST to enter this week’s random draw.  Everyone who posts has a chance to win.

2)  Check out the Facebook pages to see the cool quilts made with today’s block – Northcott has used Shimmer coral and Banyan has used Ocean Park by Scott Hansen of Blue Nickel Studio.  I met Scott and his wife and daughter at Quilt Market a couple years ago – he is so much fun!

3)  See what Daphne has been up to with Block 10 on her blog.

Enjoy your day and I’ll see you tomorrow 😊

Cheers,

Patti