While the fabric print used for this block is small, it is semi-directional. I had not really thought through how A) there were pieces of the print fabric adjacent to other pieces of the print fabric, and B) rotary cutting doesn’t lend itself to making sure everything is pointing in the same direction.
On a previous block with this fabric, I had carefully cut with templates to make sure everything was pointing the way I wanted, but here, there didn’t seem to be any hope of getting the fabric print lined up the way I wanted.
So instead of falling into directional despair, I opted for controlled chaos. When I failed at pointing all the pieces in the same direction, I focused on pointing each piece in a different direction than its neighbors. Now if people think it’s a hot mess, I’ll be able to say I arranged it this way intentionally.
This block has some truly tiny pieces – the smallest squares are 1/4″. July has typically been the month of tiny triangles, but now I think I may need to designate February as the month of tiny squares! You can see that as soon as I take my first stitch on those tiny seams, I’m already almost at the other end of the seam.
In addition to truly tiny pieces, there are just a lot of pieces in this block – 47, to be exact. It’s definitely been a challenge to keep them all straight (and facing the direction I want).
February is deep into cold and flu season, and I’ve learned my lesson in previous winters about sneezes blowing all my carefully arranged fabric pieces around, so I knew to put a 12″x12″ ruler on top of the 12″x12″ cutting mat where I’d laid out all pieces.
And then I leaned over to pick up something I’d dropped on the floor, hitting my head on the cutting mat, sending it and the ruler and the fabric pieces flying. It was quite the mess!
Luckily, due to learning my lesson previously, I’d taken corrective measures. Now I always snap a photo of the pieces all laid out, so I was able to reconstruct the layout of all 47 pieces from the photo after the incident.
After I got all 47 pieces lined back up again, I was more careful to keep my head away from the cutting mat while assembling the rest of the block.
Even the stitching was fraught with peril though. That white fabric seems to naturally gather when I stitch it, so I was constantly smoothing it out as I stitched, especially on those outer borders. And I do feel like it looks kind of sucked in on the middle of each side. Or possibly it’s my terrible photography skills.
But I’d set myself overly-ambitious goals for February (including tiny squares!), so I’m accepting the barely controlled chaos that is this block, and moving on.