Hands down, this is the fastest block for The Splendid Sampler yet.  Maybe because I love patchwork. I also need to give a big shout out though to Accuquilt though; from start to finish that saved me time by using my 1.5″ strip die with my Go cutter.  First it saved time with the cutting, but then because my cuts were so accurate, the piecing went really fast.

I took one look at this and thought I could use some techniques I learned from the recent Bargello quilt I completed.

I know I’m not the only one who’s tugged at a seam before because it didn’t quite match up.  And we all know what that looks like – the block looks wonky and there can be a pucker, or stitches stretched at the seams.  I’m happy to report I didn’t tug one single time on this block and in fact, I really didn’t even do much in the way of lining up seams; they were nearly all right on the money that I just sewed a straight seam without working at butting up matching seams.

I happened to see that Jane had used 3 fabrics, not 2 in hers and I really liked the way it looked. I decided to do the same and since I’m using various layer cakes from Moda fabrics all I needed to do was pick a light, medium, and dark fabric.  If that’s a challenge to get the contrast I’ll pass along a tip I learned – take a picture of your fabrics in grey scale and then the contrast really pops.  I laid the 3 fabrics down on my 1.5″ die cutter and with one swipe I had plenty of perfectly even width strips to work with.

Next, I picked 2 different 10″ x 1.5″ strips and sewed them together. The first 2 I sewed together were the peach and cream one.  Then I sewed a wine and peach one together, then a cream and wine one together – chain stitching those.  Then I went back and added the 3rd color to each of those so now I had 3 x 10″ strips that each included all the colors, but each one started with a different color.  In other words, the first strip was peach, cream, wine. The 2nd strip was wine, peach, cream. The 3rd strip was cream, wine, peach.

From here I cut out four 1.5″ strips from each of those sets.  Next I picked up 2 matching ones and joined them to now make one 6 square strip.  In other words, I grabbed 2 that was peach-cream-wine and sewed the peach to the wine and now I had my first strip.  I did the same thing 5 more times, alternating the top row.  That’s why I made sure first that I alternated the top color.

I had the entire block done in just about 30 minutes, from printing off the directions to pinning this block next to the rest of the group.  Easy!  I didn’t use my seam ripper even once – victory!