Saturday, September 24, 2011

Desperate Housewife's Quilt: Block Seven

Paper piecing kicks my ass. I also blame not having a sixty degree ruler.

Me being me, I tried to simply use my straight ruler’s sixty degree mark to make my cuts. Honestly, I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. So then I decided to make a cardstock template for the smaller triangles in the block which made tracing and cutting those out a breeze. Now if I were a smart person I also would have made a larger sixty degree triangle for the other pieces. Instead I puzzled over the ruler until it finally hit me to just cut out a rectangle from a folded piece the correct length and width then cut across diagonally to get one full and two half triangles. Genius. Now, if only this didn’t take an hour to figure out. Of course, listening to Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York album may have been more of a distraction than an inspiration.

Once all the pieces were cut I said to myself, “This is going to go together like a breeze!” I was alone in the house, but even if I wasn’t, me talking to myself out loud is nothing new. I made my first line of stitching, then my second and third then ripped the last two out because I had not actually put them in the proper place. Most people know I have a really hard time following directions, however, after I figured out proper placement (and actually using the folded lines that I spent all that time folding per the directions) the rest went together fairly smoothly. Of course my math was off on the larger pieces and I ended up cutting them about an inch and a half too big. Oh well, better to have too much than not enough in the world of quilting!



(The Desperate Housewife's Quilt can be found on Jane's blog at http://quiltjane.blogspot.com)

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