The whole time I was planning to do this block, I was under the impression that it was going to be appliqué. I figured you’d cut out one big piece of the green and then appliqué on the small red pieces. I even picked out one of my favorite fabrics – a kind of large, directional paisley print – for the block, figuring I wouldn’t have to worry about the printed pattern lining up at any seams.

When I went to print out the templates, I found that the block was actually intended to be constructed with curved piecing. A little more advanced than I’d planned for; I’ve never done curved piecing (unless you count setting in sleeves on garments).

I did some research to see if anyone else had used appliqué for this block. Everyone knows I never look forward to appliqué, but suddenly, it sounded much less daunting than the alternative.

The Dear Jane software gave two alternatives: the curved piecing option, and an appliqué option where you actually appliqué all the big green pieces on to a red background piece. I wasn’t super excited about that approach, because most of the block would be two layers thick, making it more difficult to hand quilt later.

The Dear Jane website mentioned the green on red appliqué technique above, plus a much too-brief description of a reverse appliqué technique with a broken link to a site with more details.

My go-to site for excellent Dear Jane quilt block instructions, That Quilt, suggested a combo of piecing and reverse appliquéing that I found intriguing, but was hesitant to try since I’d never done reverse appliqué either.

Failing to find a single instance on the Internet of anyone doing red on green appliqué, I opted to try curved piecing for the first time.

The premise is pretty simple: on the concave curved piece (the one that curves inward), you have to make little cuts partway into the seam allowance, so that you can “bend” the fabric in the opposite direction and line it up with the convex curved piece (the one that curves outward). In actuality, it’s like herding cats.

The convex curve of those almond shapes is about 1.5 inches long, and in that space, I had to use 7 pins to keep everything in place. The process was basically: take two stitches, remove a pin, take another two stitches, remove another pin, and repeat endlessly.

The order of construction for this block was kind of surprising to me, but cool. You sew those almonds to the center X, which makes a kind of misshapen inner circle (hence the blog article title). Then you sew those misshapen trapezoid pieces to the squares to make a misshapen ring that goes around the inner circle. Lastly, you sew triangles on the corners to turn the block into a square.

It doesn’t look possible that the circle will fit inside the ring, but it does. Plenty of pins and swearing are involved in the process.

Here’s the back of the two pinned together pieces, where you can really see the number of pins. I cut down from 7 pins per almond shape to 5 or 6 here, because there were so many pins in the thing that I had trouble holding it to sew without stabbing myself.

And here’s the front of the two pinned together pieces. This is the side that I could see while I was stitching around the edges.

You can just barely see on the top left one of the places where I cut partway into the green seam allowance to bend the fabric – there is a little triangle of red peeking through the slit.

This is definitely one of the most challenging blocks I’ve done to date.

I’m really excited though, because I’ve finally broken into the “inner circle” of the quilt (hence the blog article title again). I’m talking about a five by five square of blocks in the middle of the quilt (so, I guess technically it’s an “inner square”), which contains all advanced difficulty or extra-challenging-for-intermediate difficulty blocks in it.

I’d been working on easier blocks all around the edges of the quilt, but this is the first time I’ve attempted one of those tricky blocks in the middle. I’ll try not to let the power go to my head now that I’m in the inner circle.