This block looks complicated, but once you sew those little triangles onto the kite shapes to make pie wedges, it’s essentially just a slightly rotated pinwheel block.

The biggest challenge was keeping track of which little triangles went in which spots on the kite pieces.

I cut the little red triangles so that the outer edges were on the straight of grain, so I didn’t have to worry about the edges of the block being on the bias and getting stretched out of shape.

And I cut the little white triangles so that the outer edges were on the bias, so the grain would be going the same direction as all the other pieces in the block once they were assembled.

But other than the direction of the grain, the left and right little triangles looked pretty much the same.

To avoid getting mixed up, I cut out the left and right triangles in different batches, and kept them stacked with their corresponding pattern piece. Then I arranged both sets of pieces with their kite shapes to keep track of what went where.

And I triple-checked before stitching every single one.

The red triangles, where the outer edge was along the grain, seemed the easiest to keep straight, so I raced to do the little white triangles before I left for the first night of bowling league.

I figured even if the pieces got a little mixed up in my travel kit, I could still look for the edge on the grain, and keep that edge furthest away from the kite piece.

And now that the block is done, I think I’ve been successful – the grain lines up on all 28 pieces.

The only “mishap” is that I got it in my head before the corners were sewn on that I needed to mark the top of the block, and I accidentally marked the “top” on one of the segments that’s attached to a corner triangle. So, off by about 45 degrees. You may be able to see my little pink “T” (for “top”) mark in the top left corner.

My “top” marking may have missed the mark, but the block itself is right on the mark!