This week’s block is named Iowa, or more commonly known as the snowball block.  You can find a link (for now) to it at The Splendid Sampler .

The first thing I did was to look at the fabrics I’ve been using and decide on the 4 (plus 1 contrast) fabrics I wanted to use. I had 5 that caught my eye, so I laid them out against the off-white fabric to see if one didn’t fit, and decided to leave out the one on the far left.

I laid the fabric out in the order, top to bottom, that I planned to use and then cut per the instructions.  Next I drew a line, corner to corner, on the wrong side of each off-white square and laid all the rows out with the squares on top to make sure I had everything done correctly, given my recent debacle. 

From there, I was ready to sew the 8 squares to the 6 long strips of fabric.  Whether it’s flying geese, or anything that has to do with creating triangles in a corner, the directions will nearly always refer to sewing a “scant” seam. To me, that means putting my needle down just far enough to one side that I can barely see the drawn line as I sew past it. If you zoom in on the picture with my needle down, you can see that it hits just to the left of the line I drew. 

I had one of those sticky sheets with guidelines on it that came with my extended sewing table but it drove me nuts – I had to lift it up every time to get to my top loading bobbin, which wasn’t save me the time that it was intended for since invariably I had to reposition at least part of it. So I promptly took that back off and draw on the fabric.

I do use a Frixion pen though so that it will iron out. I got lazy once or twice and grabbed my blue ball point pen; that didn’t turn out well.

From there, it was just a matter of lining up seams and sewing the rows together. When I am trying to make sure I don’t lose the points in a diamond or triangle, I make sure to have the triangle side facing up. That way I can see where the seam is that I’m trying to sew over. I know if I cross over that seam to the left in this picture, that I’ll “lose my point”. 

And yes, I’ve been known to sew partial seams if there are points I’m trying to hit on both sides but in different locations. The hardest ones of all are trying to match up points that are lined up exactly on both the top and bottom fabric, as in a row of diamonds.

And like that, I was finished! This block was designed by Sherri McConnell