I had a plan! I was going to use that Add-A-Quarter ruler for the next patchwork block that came up. After all, most of the blocks so far have included a separate page with the template.  And then….no template for Thursday’s block this week. Undeterred, I went into EQ7 and just made one myself!  What you can’t see is when I went to print it, since it’s a mirror image that’s centered vertically and horizontally on the paper – I printed the patter on both sides.  In other words, the side that I lay the fabric on I can also see the pattern.  Yay me – I need all the help I can get!

I’m not great at EQ7. I have yet to figure out how to get to their quilting stencils as an example. When I have something I want to do in it, I generally go through their tutorials or YouTube, but what that means is I don’t know what I don’t know about EQ7.  Some day!

In fact, I had no sooner said that and went to print it when I noticed this little gem. Thank you brillian EQ7 employee(s) who came up with this.  It’s under rotary cutting options when I went to print.  If you can’t see the detail, it tells me the dimensions to each each piece.  Turns out I ignored it because I just used my ruler but I like the idea!

I figured out that I needed to sew the 4-patch in the middle first and then promptly sewed it…upside down.  Rip off the paper, print a new one, secretly congratulate myself for messing up the paper and not the fabric since paper is much cheaper.  Before long, I was on a roll, and got to use my handy dandy Add-A-Quarter ruler.  And suddenly, I realized how this thing works.

Who needs instructions when it’s so perfectly made that it is perfectly logical right out out of the wrapper?  Turns out – I love this ruler!  I have to admit I didn’t see the value of it before and as it turns out, since I had done paper piecing before it probably wouldn’t have been as valuable to me.  Now that I’m getting the hang of it, I can see how it’s invaluable to a paper piecer.

Here we are, completed.  I realized after I finished my strips around the inner square aren’t pieces the same as Lindsay Mayland shows on the Splendid Sampler page which I missed in the paper piecing event. But if you look at it in the middle of 16 blocks, that completely disappears.  If you haven’t seen the mini quilt that Lindsay made out of 4 of these blocks, definitely check it out.  Very cute!

I’m rearranging some of my blocks as we go through this; I’m trying to get a good mixture of light vs. dark and sometimes that’s hard to conceptualize before the block is finished.