this took forever

At least it felt like forever! These two little 8" blocks were my first assignment in the latest Amitie Textiles Block of the Month program, "Bring Me Flowers" Each previous BOM they have put together has been spectacular, and in the past I've always kicked myself for not joining as I watched my online friends churning out all these amazing blocks. So this year I jumped in!

I'm going to spare you all the gritty details about every misstep I've made, but the basic story is this: these blocks are intended to be hand-pieced. My hand-piecing skills are quite rusty, so I intend to machine piece where I can and muddle through or improvise the rest. The real treat is the eclectic assortment of beautiful fabrics they send each month, and since I didn't want to waste any of them, I wisely decided to make a test block first with some scraps. That's where the "wisdom" ended for me on this journey.

Thinking I was a pretty smart cookie, I decided that those double pinwheels could be easily machine pieced by making some smaller half-square-triangles (HSTs), cutting those into quarter-square triangles (QSTs) and then sewing the QSTs to another larger triangle.

Uhhh, what just happened?

Try #2. Okay, I'll cut all the triangles and forget about that brilliant shortcut that was neither brilliant nor a shortcut.

So far, so good. Poor fabric choices, but you get the idea - these blocks look correct.

Woo-hoo! Double pinwheels made with the real fabrics look great!

Then on to the "basket" section. I cut one large square of the basket fabric and two smaller squares of the background fabric to sew diagonally and make the triangles at each corner. And I spent quite a bit of time calculating how big the background squares needed to be. Not enough time apparently, because both were incorrect and the basket was too large on the first try and too small on the second try. Oh, and when the basket construction started, I was feeling pretty sure of myself and used the real fabrics. Whoops.

After more cutting and re-cutting, un-stitching and re-stitching, I finally wound up with two correctly sized baskets. Add in some time making bias tape for the stems, freezer paper templates for the circles, and some sewing time appliqueing the center circles and you get...

FOREVER.

But now they're done, and I'm pretty darn happy with these little cuties :)

Included in the instructions is a statement informing me that many of the fabrics sent this month will be re-used in future months. Hmmmm. Since I've used ALL of one of the background fabrics and most of one of the floral prints during this learning adventure, my quilt will end up being truly unique (which I'm actually quite happy about) because I'll be doing some fabric substitution in those future months! Oh well, it's all part of growing and stretching yourself to learn new things, right?!

And I'll definitely be putting a label like this on my finished quilt. Haha!! You can buy them here.