After those endless tiny strips of the last month, I really needed to do something different. This block seemed like a fun and deceptively easy change of pace.

At first glance, the block looks extremely complicated … like it was formed by tying the fabric in a big knot.

In reality, it was pretty easy to assemble. The trick is to rotate it 45 degrees. Viewed as a diamond, it is clear that the block is just a bunch of diagonal stripes sewn together. This is my favorite kind of block: it looks difficult, but it isn’t.

The toughest part of this block ended up having nothing to do with the construction and everything to do with the fabric.

I’ve learned to pick small-scale prints for this kind of block, where there are so many adjacent pieces. If I’d used a bigger print, it would have looked very chopped up at the seams. So, I was pleased with the tiny random-looking cream colored print I chose.

Usually, when you have one fabric much lighter than the other, you press the seams towards the darker fabric, to try to prevent the seam allowance from showing through the light colored fabric. On this block, most of the block was lighter fabric, so I didn’t have a lot of choice.

Appropriately, the name of this block is “Peek-A-Boo”. I took the picture of the finished block sitting on my dark green cutting mat, and you can see the seams are peek-a-booing through the cream fabric. My hope is once it has white batting behind the block, the seams will not be as visible.

The difficulty did not stop with the fabric though; it extended to the thread. When you’re sewing together a light and a dark fabric, it is generally recommended to use the darker color for the thread.

My plan was to use cream thread when sewing two cream pieces together, and red thread for all the other seams.

The problem with this block is that, despite how little red is in the block, there was not a single seam that didn’t include a red piece at some point. So, even when I was sewing a cream piece to another cream piece, I had to use red thread, because further along in the seam, I would be sewing cream to red.

I tried to minimize the impact of the red thread as much as possible, even making the knots at the end of the thread extra small and clipping the ends extra short, so nothing would potentially dangle out beyond the seam allowance.

Even with all these precautions, I’m still worried about how this block is going to look when it’s assembled with the batting.

My “knot” was “not” as simple as I thought.