Quilt Block Exchange: Cheryl’s Blocks

Oh man, Cheryl picked a hard fabric. Cheryl picked a very Cheryl fabric. The focus fabric for April was this very busy, multicolored vine on black. Too much of this and your eyes start swimming when looking at it. When I saw it I instantly knew that this was a background fabric. It was always going to recede in whatever block you put it in, so I had to find a pattern that a) had a background and b) had enough parts that I could pick enough of the bright colors out of the focus fabric.

I found this paper pieced star block. It’s actually a very simple block at just 3 pieces per paper. The challenge was that the pattern for it in the book is printed at half size. So you would have to enlarge it by 200%. Now I currently do not have a working printer/scanner, so I’m obliged to go to the copy shop to copy my patterns. I don’t really mind this too much as it gets me out of the house and it’s kind of fun, but for some reason I decided this was not doable at the time.

So I actually drew this block’s pattern out by hand. Which I think was a really valuable learning experience on the way to designing my own blocks. And of course having to get the angles and lengths right on each hand drawn paper a challenge you don’t have to deal with when you photocopy! I think it turned out well, and here are the other blocks turned in for Cheryl!

Top row: Becky, Liz. Bottom row: mine, Diane

Jane’s block

And this one is Jane’s block, which was turned in at the May meeting instead. I kind of sat on this post for a month because not all the blocks were turned in, but I can’t let myself get buried in the hole on this. Still missing Peggy’s block for Cheryl.