A funny thing happened on the way to the forum.  Not really; I just always think of that musical any time I say “a funny thing happened….”.  My parents started taking me to the theatre at the university near where I grew up when I was probably in grade school; does anyone else have quirky little phrases like that which don’t make sense to anyone else except you?

I couldn’t remember the name of the block I had finished over lunch and so when I went to The Splendid Sampler site, lo and behold, Pat Sloan is hosting a contest where you make and show either the block you’ve been putting off or if you are current with all 67 blocks to date completed, to show a photo of all 67.

It doesn’t happen all the time, but sometimes I’m caught up and today is one of those days.  I need to reshuffle some of my blocks again to get the colors spread out evenly.  Last time I put them in stacks of paper pieced, embroidery, applique and then the others into light vs. dark.  I’m really glad I haven’t sewn a bunch of these together yet so that I’m able to keep shuffling as we add to the stack.

Where was I?  Oh yes, block 65 from a week ago.  She was kind enough to provide the template for paper piecing – score!  This 6″ block only has 53 pieces in it.  I whipped that out in no time…kidding.  I started working on it Sunday afternoon and finished it up over lunch today.  It wasn’t hard, just a lot of tiny pieces.

I was a little confused by some blocks that I saw which seemed to not have those odd shaped pieces in the corners which don’t meet.  The pattern actually shows it the way I have it laid out here.  The designer of this block,  Siobhan Rogers, says she likes bear claw and sawtooth blocks.  I have to admit, I saw a feathered star layout on these edges.  They all make use of the half square triangle.

I kept thinking as I sewed this one that if I’d done it the Eleanor Burns way of piecing together 2 strips of light and dark and then cut on the 45 degree angle, I might’ve finished this a little sooner.  It’s done now and that means I can enter Pat’s contest now that I’m caught up again.

I was in a LQS earlier this week (and wow do I ever love the flannel fabrics from Moda!); my friend works in there and she asked if I could enlarge a pattern for her using EQ7.  Of course!  I do that all the time for myself.  The owner and I started talking about it’s a really robust software program but sometimes not all that intuitive and we both apparently forget how to do some things in there if we don’t use it regularly.  One thing I forgot how to do today is to get it back to “snap to grid”.  In other words, if I click pretty close to where I want to start or end a line, it knows that I really meant to click exactly on the line.
The first step, when you’re in the block design area, is to click on that 3rd icon down the left to draw a line.  Then, the second thing is along the upper horizontal tool bar, click on that last icon that says “more drawing board options” when you over over it. Once you’ve opened that up, click on “snapping”, and then click the top 2 blocks; click OK to save and then it will start snapping again.

Every once in a while, mine seems to go off kilter and do something else so it’s good to remember how I can get myself back to the way I like to have it set up.