I thought I would have another look at my left over "orphan" blocks this week and see what I could make. There was a heap of 4" four patch blocks, so I thought I could start with this. After laying them down and playing about for a bit I came up with a suitable setting.
I did not try to match the blocks at all except to not put the same next to each other. Just one failure on that point. Never mind - Dolly won't notice.
With this kind of onpoint setting you need to get the sides right. If you cut them the wrong way you get a wobbly edge. Not so bad in these little quilts, but horrible in the larger ones.
To get this measurement right you need to take the size of the finished block - 4" and multiply it by 1.414, then add 1.25: for seam allowance, and then round it up to the next 1/8th of an inch. Sounds complicated? here is the way to do it. So this would be 4 x 1.414 = 5.656 + 1.25 = 6.906 --- round that up to 7".
So I cut 2 squares 7", then cut on the diagonal twice to get 8 triangles, and that gives me the long side of the triangle on the outer edge of the quilt.
Now, for the outer corners it is kind of reversed.......4" divided by 1.414 = 2.82 + .875 for the seam allowance = 3.7. So round that up to 3 3/4". Cut it in half once and you get the outer corners.
The triangles are all attached and you can start joining the rows. When making a large quilt you might want to check the directions of the pressed seams so that they butt in and sit flat. I did not bother for this little one. I did press all the seams where the triangles joined, in the direction of the triangle.
All done in about an hour. I decided to not do a border as the setting triangles kind of make the border.
Binding and quilting completed. At first I machine quilting in the ditch between the blocks, and then did the binding, which I cut a little narrower to reflect the size of the doll quilt. After that I did a little hand quilting with Valdani perle cotton in variegated pink. You can see a little of the wobbly lines in the top photo.
And, I did start the Di Ford Mystery quilt from Quiltmania. I prefer the reds and greens I have chosen from my own fabric stash. The Broderie Perse fabric is still undecided, so I am working around the that. I joined the 2 Facebook pages for this quilt, and the ones done from fabric packs look great, but the photos look all just the same - each quilt is identical. My vase looks a little wobbly in the photo. It might just need a press.
Your DI Ford mystery looks great in these Colourbox Wendy.
ReplyDeleteLove your little quilt and the blue fabric especially!! I hope you'll add the blog post with your swap quilt you received to my linky party.:)
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