With this block, I continued trying to find a home for the boring cream fabric I opted not to use in Block B9. Except that I didn’t like the fabric here either. The size of the motifs and the amount of whitespace (creamspace?) between the motifs made it look really odd in the center square, no matter which way I turned the fabric.
So I went fabric-spelunking. I found several fabric candidates, none of which were quite right:
The most promising candidate was the one with the pinecones (shown at the bottom center in the photo above), but I could only find a 3″ square of it, and I swore I had a larger piece.
When I went back the second time to search for that larger piece, I happened across some random squares that came with the Dear Jane “kit” that I’d completely forgotten about, including three in a cream print with red flowers and other motifs. They’re shown here on the right, next to the original boring fabric on the left:
The background color was just right, there was less space between the motifs so it wouldn’t look so weird with things chopped off at the seams, and I had an almost 6″ square and two 4″ squares … just enough to cut out the pieces for this block.
There was definitely not enough fabric for any serious fussy cutting. So I spent a lot of time shifting the pieces around to find the most pleasing arrangement of motifs. And there definitely wasn’t much left of it when I was done:
This block pattern feels almost like my nemesis – the diamond in a square block. I stitched together the three triangles along each side to make trapezoids:
Then I stitched those trapezoids to the sides of the center square (like attaching the corner triangles to the center square for a diamond-in-a-square block). Finally, I added a layer of actual corner triangles to the not-quite-a-diamond to finish the block. Thankfully, things lined up better on this one than on my last quasi-diamond-in-a-square effort.
And it’s also a warm-up for my third corner block, coming up next. There are diamond in a square blocks everywhere I turn!