After finishing the basket block on my first morning at retreat, I went full steam ahead on this block in the afternoon. I knew I didn’t stand a chance of getting totally caught up on my block-making schedule (I’d gotten that far behind), but I was hoping to make some good progress during my three days at retreat.

You may notice I’ve been doing a lot of blocks from row J lately; I thought it would be cool to finish up one entire row, and this was the last unfinished block in row J.

It seems like I always forget to bring at least one thing to retreat, and this retreat was no exception: I’d forgotten to make a printout of this block so I could mark the placement of the leaf shapes on the background fabric. So, I tried to wing it and get them more or less in the right position.

The leaves were all the same size, and were laid out in a 3×3 grid – the leaf shapes even look sort of like giant cross-stitch stitches. Since the finished blocks are 4.5″ square, each of the “squares” in the grid should be 1.5″ square. I used my chalk pencil to make tiny marks at 1.5″ intervals on the background fabric, so I’d know just where to place the leaf shapes. One problem resolved, at least.

The center square of the grid has two leaf shapes overlapping each other in an X shape, and that’s where I started with my appliqué. Unfortunately, I forgot to trim down the seam allowance on the first leaf shape before sewing it on to the background. So, in addition to the extra fabric bulk of having two pieces of appliqué on top of the background fabric, I now had extra unnecessary seam allowance stuffed back behind there.

I was definitely not on my A game with this block – hence the article title – but I remembered to trim the seam allowance on all the other leaf shapes, and I feel like the finished block looks okay.

Plus, it’s pretty exciting to be done with an entire row! My original plan was to start sewing the blocks together into rows – I work so slowly that I’ve been feeling a little sad and jealous when other people post their recently completed entire rows of blocks. I want to have that ta-da moment myself.

Now that I’ve finished my first full row, however, I’ve decided I don’t want to assemble the blocks in rows anyways. Who wants to sew twelve 5-foot-long seams by hand? Ugh. Instead, I’m going to sew the blocks together into squarer sections of blocks (4×4 or 5×5 or something like that), then sew those sections together. If I plan it right, I should only have a couple of seams that are longer than two feet when assembling the square blocks.

I was so tired after finishing this block (two done in one day!) that my fellow retreat-goers sent me home to bed right after dinner, which turned out to be a smart move. While the block came out reasonably nice when I was “on my J game”, a good night’s rest would get me back on my A game for the next block.