Does this block look like it was hard to make?  I sure hope it does.  I hope that you can look at that, see a 6″ finished block and then imagine just how incredibly tiny some of the pieces are on here, like the top of the bodice.  And the teeny tiny triangle at the bottom left of the spool that matches the background fabric.

I’ll walk you through the story, but if you’re the type of person that jumps to the end of the story, I’ll go ahead and tell it here.  This story ends with me resting on the couch with a glass of wine!

If it isn’t obvious, this was a paper pieced block.  The sections of the block went from the letter A and went through I think M. I’d go look but the aforementioned glass of wine is telling me it doesn’t matter – just say it was a whole buncha letters!  A couple of letters – to the left and right of the bodice top – were just 1 number but most had 3 or 4 numbers assigned to each letter.  In other words, I sewed A1 to A2, then A3.  Then B1, B2, B3 and B4 – and then sew the finished A section to B.  C and D were mirror images of A and B.

Confused yet?

In the photos above, the first picture is A and B.  The second photo has A/B sewn to C/D and then the right-hand portion of the skirt, followed by the finished skirt.

After that, I sewed the top to the bottom.  But wait! There’s more behind door 2!  That’s right – there was also the spool to finish and then finally the needle.  I don’t know why I had so much trouble with the spool but I’m guessing “thinking fatigue” set in and I sewed the bottom end of that spool not once, not twice but 3 times before I finally got it right.  Once was because it was the one and only time I accidentally cut on the line and forgot my 1/4″ seam allowance.  The second time was I sewed 2 of the top parts of the spool and those are not a mirror image left/right so ….oh yeah….now I remember….I sewed that bottom part of the spool 4 times.  You get the idea.

Finally I had the dress finished.  I had the spool of thread finished.  It was time for the needle.  See that “M” section?  There are five pieces to that.    The teeniest, tiniest, itsy bitsiest pieces to make the top portion of the needle are M2 and M3.

I threw up the white flag.  My needle and background fabric are made up of 3 pieces!  And I feel a little bit of remorse about taking a shortcut but I don’t think that remorse is gonna last too long, my friends.

I am officially finished with 27 of 100 blocks.  This block was designed by the very talented, super creative Charise Randell.

I thoroughly enjoyed making it because like Charise, I also made a lot of doll clothes growing up; in my case it was mostly for Barbie dolls.  She hand sewed hers but I sewed most of mine on the machine and I’m here to tell ya…Barbie doll arm hole seams are something else!

In keeping with the way I made my Barbie dolls’ clothes growing up, I used whatever scraps I found on the sewing table at the time.  Mom loved me and I loved Mom but no way was she going to spend a lot of money for me to make umpteen outfits for my dolls.  And I loved to sew as much then as I do now!

I also cut and basted 2 more Lucy Boston blocks.  The one on the left is a kit from a well known seller of patchwork of the crosses block kits on Etsy.  The second one was also a kit and I need your honest opinion.

The outer 4 corners – the stripes – those are in place of what she sent…because the seller of that kit did not sell enough to fussy cut mirror images.  I’m undecided if those 4 corners fit with the rest of the block.  Do the 4 corners look out of kilter to you? I will use those in something else later if I need to but I need an honest opinion from my blogging friends.  You sure won’t hurt my feelings if you say “yuck!” – I think I’m just too close to them to decide if it looks funky and unexpected…or just bad.