Don’t let the title fool you; this blog post is not about fishing. Instead, it’s about one woman’s very real struggle to cut out accurate 45-degree parallelograms.

I was all pleased that the pieces for this block were totally rotary cut, so I didn’t need to trace and cut out any template pattern pieces this time. That was before I realized that cutting out parallelograms was going to tax my spatial reasoning skills to the limit.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time doing mental (and physical!) calisthenics with my ruler before remembering my old standby: Rotary Magic by Nancy Johnson-Srebro. This book is currently available at Amazon for the low, low bargain price of $12.98 (or at least it was as of September 2017), and it would be a steal at twice the price. I think I paid $30 for mine almost 20 years ago, and have used it to the point that some of the pages are coming a little loose.

One of the many awesome features of this book is a guide to cutting out various shapes with a rotary cutter and ruler. It spells out the math required to add a seam allowance to the finished size of the shape, then shows how and where to make each cut, including ruler positioning diagrams.

This book also, incidentally, has my favorite quilt binding technique, one that I have used on every quilt I’ve made since 1998.

Back to the parallelograms: making a strip the height of the parallelograms was easy, as was making the diagonal cut for the third side of the parallelogram. It was that fourth side that was giving me fits. I’d been trying to position the ruler in such a way that it measured the width of the parallelogram (so I’d know how far away to make the last cut), and also indicated the correct 45-degree angle to cut – it turns out it’s not possible to do both these things at the same time with a standard quilting ruler.

Ms. Johnson-Srebro came to the rescue with the suggestion to measure the width of the parallelogram and make a pencil mark at that spot, then reposition the ruler at the correct 45-degree angle, lined up with the pencil mark. It seems super obvious now. Why couldn’t I think of that at the time?

Once I got my parallelograms straightened (er … angled) out, I’d like to say the block went together quickly. Unfortunately, real life intruded. Back-to-school events, home repairs making my sewing space inaccessible … and suddenly almost two weeks had gone by with very little progress.

I pushed myself to spend 15 minutes a day on the block until it was done, but I can’t help feeling that I should have been more enthusiastic about it. Maybe, after so many diamond blocks in a row, I should try a totally different style of block next. Maybe I need a little break from the project. Maybe I should just take up fishing instead.