Back to School

Well, the week of spring break flew by! Today I was back to school being creative with the kiddos. If you'd ever like to see what kinds of things go on in my artroom, stop on over to Portrait of An Art Room. Anyway, when I got home from this first day back, I had to have a sewing break. 

The modified pineapple block that I posted about earlier had to be revisited. There was much discussion about the blocks on our bee Facebook page. It seems that the cutting directions made some of the steps a little tricky. In the end, the blocks I made were not the right size. So I went back to the drawing board. It was suggested that we cut squares at 3 1/2" (2), 4", 5", 6", 8". Needless to say, the sizes had to be adjusted slightly. Members of the group were having to trim down quite a bit after piecing to get the next square to fit. The final block is about 10 1/2". 

Pictorial Recap!

Pinch to cut!

Cut on pencil lines, press open.

Place next size square on top and sew around.

In addition to the grey modified pineapple block from the previous post, we were to make a block that showed a color gradient. This block would be made of seven fabrics instead of only 6. With that in mind, I followed the same steps for the grey block. We were supposed to cut and then cut an additional square of 9". If you remember though, the grey block ended up being 10 1/2", that would be an awful lot of trimming to get a 9" square to fit. So I cut a 10 1/2" square of the seventh fabric. 

Wait a second! (Here I imagine the sound of a record needle screeching across the vinyl to a stop.) I couldn't do that though. I had only purchased quarter yard cuts of each of my fabrics with a final 9" square needed. I had to do some creative problem solving.  

I ended up cutting two right triangles; one triangle for each half of the square. I knew, that had it been a square of the appropriate size, I would be cutting anyway, so why not just start with two pieces. This worked out well for me.

I am realizing that as an artist, and art teacher that I often am much more forgiving when things need a little finesse to get them to work out. I hope that if you try this technique you are understanding that there may be a little trimming here and there to get all of the squares to match up. Perhaps, as I've just read about, we need to stitch with a scant 1/4" seam. My seams are pretty true to 1/4", so that could cause some, hmm, a good word for here, frustration.

Here is my grey block, on top of the color gradation. I don't want to reveal the final block until our Leader Bee receives them.

This block is the April block for the WERQ Bee. It's the first quilting bee, online or otherwise, that I've ever joined. It's made up of a great group of all male quilters! I was very excited when I stumbled across the parent group. Men Who Quilt on Facebook. It was a group created in tandem with the No Girls Allowed Quilting Bee which I first heard about on Molli Sparkles blog, you can read about it here.  I guess I will have to compose a list of those who are in the WERQ Bee and link to those who have blogs, instagrams, and flickr accounts. That will come soon.

Do you belong to any bees? Do they have photo sharing pages that we should know about?

Here goes anything! Linking up with Stitch by Stitch, Anything Goes Monday.