I cut out the pieces for this about a week before Valentine’s Day, in hopes of a timely finish. But of course I’m so behind on my blogging that you’re not hearing about it till Leap Day … two holidays later.

This is my fourth block in a row with some amount of appliqué … it’s almost like I’ve been subconsciously avoiding the appliqué blocks for seven years and now there are a whole bunch left to do near the end of the project.

The tricky part with appliqué blocks like this is getting everything lined up so that the pieces are equidistant from each other in the finished block.

Three of the hearts look pretty good, but the fourth (ironically the first one I stitched on), is slightly off, so that it is closer to one adjacent heart than the other.

Still, I think it is not glaringly obvious, and I don’t want to redo it.

The other lesson to be learned here is in fabric selection. The chosen white/ivory fabric was a little thinner than I had hoped for, and I feel like the turned under part of the appliqué hearts is very noticeably different than the parts of the heart that don’t have an extra layer underneath.

It kind of looks like visible panty lines – the horror!

There’s really nothing I can do about it now, though, unless I’m willing to redo the block in a different fabric (I’m not).

At this point, the best solution is to fix it during the quilting phase of the project. If I quilt it by stitching exactly where the turned-under seam allowance ends, hopefully that line of stitching right between the areas that have turned under fabric and those that don’t will make the color difference less noticeable.

The good news is that at the new pace I’m completing blocks (two per month!), I will be done with all the blocks well before the next Leap Day rolls around.