Wednesday, January 12, 2011

BLOCK ONE

BLOCK ONE PINE TREE
The first block is done for each of the Christmas quilts. This is the Pine Tree block. 
What did I learn from this block?  If a thangle or a thangle-like paper for making half square triangles says "finishes at 2inches" it actually means when you are finished cutting them out it is 2" not the 2.5 you need to actually make the block.
I had all of the strips sewn together, only to see that they were too small.  You would think that by this point in my quilting life I could eyeball 2.5". 
The next thing I learned is that "templates are not bad things".  The group of patterns for this quilt are old enough that there are only templates offered for all of the pieces.  Once I got to the big triangles, I cut out the freezer paper templates and use those.  The worked like a dream. These would have been done on Sunday if I hadn't had to make them over again. 

It was fun, stay tuned for the next batch.

2 comments:

marlene@ByTheSeam said...

I have always liked that block but with all the hst's I am never sure I want to do it.

Rian said...

I think I'd be tempted to paper-piece those.