Gifts of August

In the last week I've noticed that the nights are getting quite a bit cooler, we've had to break out the quilts a few times. Summer is starting to give way to Fall. I guess we are towards the end of August but it seems like this summer has just flown.











My son starts college tomorrow and I'm nostalgic, nervous and a bit overwhelmed. My baby is grown up! When did this happen?

 

In the midst of all the melee, I've whittled away a small amount of time to work on those two blocks I need to do to catch up. For this post, we are going to focus on month 10, the Seasons of Giving Blocks.









This block is pretty quick to piece as most of it is simply squares and rectangles.

 


There is the prerequisite snowballing for the
bow.

Then we put it all together with some space in between...

 

And voilà, we have a beautiful block.

Pretty Bobbles

I'm sorry, I know I owe you two more blocks. June and July have been a whirl of activities and my poor sewing room has been a chicken nursery for much of it.




First, this guy graduated! Yeah. I never realized how small of a school my child went to until I saw his graduating class of 63! Oh my, only 63 kids in his class? It's been quite a challenge and we are so proud of him. Way to go Dixon!






And there was the driving test to get his license and he did that too! That's been quite a long ride for us! Because of schedules, it's been a two year affair to get this done.

The last days

Then there were college classes to set up, placement tests, financial aid forms, etc. I am still filling out forms, using all my vacation time etc. just to get this all set up. Makes my head spin!

of riding the bus...

so makes my heart

break and swell with pride at the same time...

And of course, these guys were living in the craft room in the meantime.

So for the June blocks I decided to do the ornaments. They are really cute in the book but honestly, I'm probably going to go back and re-do four of the blocks. When you are working on the bias on squares that are 2" or smaller, it's a miserable experience.

I'm a visual person and I looked at the pictures while assembling and realized that, for some reason, they have us snowballing the corners of the blocks as we are making the stars. I didn't quite get that until I made all the ornaments then realized that was what they were doing. My ornaments came out rather wonky.

Which, admittedly can be cute but wasn't at all the look I was going for. And for some reason, the first four blocks did not come out at all the same size as the final block that I took more time on, hence, I'll be redoing the other four.

 Sew the corner "E" square, cut, press and put the other "E" square next to it, repeat to make the star.

Here you see my first mistake, these are the "C" pieces that were supposed to make up the corner, not the star. I skimmed the directions and that I where I made the mistake.

 

 Sew in rows with solid blocks in corners and middle as shown above.

 

Then snowball the corners. I recommend for simplicity to do the nine patch first, THEN snowball the corners.

 

Otherwise, you run the risk of sewing the wrong pieces together like I did.

 

This is what they will look like.

 

Add the other portions with the top block swapping b/w the top and the bottom to create the "bobbing" effect of the ornaments.

 

Like so.

 I rushed ont he first four but the last one I cut and put together as I did it. It looks much better and is to the correct size than the first four but you get the idea.

 Once I get caught up to the current month, I will go back and remake these blocks. Overall the design is nice but I would have liked a much better technique to produce these then the constant snowballing. I believe Eleanor Burns has a small geese ruler and I think that would be a more accurate and easier way to produce these.

UPDATE:

Ok, I really was unhappy with these so I remade all but the last one. Here is what the blocks look like now.