Block 6

Ooh, see that, kittens? I barely get a knitting post out and BAM! Quilting posts again. I'm tricksy like that.








This is block 06 of 27. Now that I have a much stronger sense of direction for the colors, these are getting easier to piece, and I'm enjoying the process more. I finished this one last night and then proceeded onto a new project...Block 02, revisited.

Kittens, if you can recall, Block 02 looked like this...








and I was very unhappy with it. When I first dreamt up this quilt, I wanted to use a very slightly green-blue with bright red. And for some reason, that idea never left me. I washed up my red and green-blue fabrics, cut a couple, and tried to work them into this quilt. You gotta keep 'em separated. For real. These colors did not mix nicely and fought for the block. Sections went nicely together, but that was as good as it got.

This one was the worst offender of the two I was going to just "chuck." And by chuck, I mean use for something else. I didn't want to lose the segments that I liked, but trying to figure out how to deal with them was giving me a headache. Because you see, kittens, I suffer from this chronic condition called, "laziness." Anytime a project requires a lot of tedious picking out and repinning of seams--or you know, pinning them in the first place--I tend to scoff at the idea and drop it. I hate losing work I've already done. I have started to take baby steps in the right direction. This last week I've been seen ripping out a seam here or there and redoing it...or taking extra care to pin pieces together and ensure they won't be moving while I sew. But redo a whole block? That's just crazy talk.

But then I had an idea. An awful, putzy idea. What if I didn't rip out the entire block? What if I...

grafted new pieces on top of the old? And sewed them along the lines I'll later use to quilt the block?!

!!!

This is either genius, or a whole new level of avoidance and laziness. I'm not sure which yet.

Regardless, it worked after some fussiness, and I decided to make over the other two strips that weren't jiving with the way I wanted these blocks to look.

So much better. See how much happier the left side of that block is? This was the point where I went to bed in the wee hours of this morning, but by early this afternoon...







The whole thing was complete.

I'll be honest: this still isn't my favorite block of the ones I've completed. But it is so. much. better. then it was before I made the fixes to it.

Block 03 will also be getting a minor face lift after I decide what fabric to graft on. I think it should be OK with replacing just the middle square.