I’d been dragging my feet on doing this, the “first” block, because it bothered me that the design in the Dear Jane book and software (as shown below) did not match the actual block in Jane Stickle’s quilt.

But I was running out of blocks to do, so I figured I’d better come up with a plan.

You may remember in a previous block that I’d decided I would settle these design differences by changing mine to match Jane’s quilt only if it seemed like she’d done it that way on purpose.

And in this case, it definitely seemed like she had done this on purpose. The Dear Jane software showed uniform half-square triangles for this block. Jane’s “triangles” were not uniform, but in a consistent enough way that it was clear she meant to do that.

So, I opted to use Susan Gatewood’s pattern in order to make the finished block look more like the original. After a previous attempt to use Susan Gatewood’s patterns went awry, this time I measured to make sure the pattern pieces were the correct size before starting.

But when it came time to actually cut things out, I was stymied by the fact that I don’t do foundation piecing, and her patterns are really set up only for foundation piecing.

I ended up cutting out templates from different sections of the printout, so I could get seam allowance on all sides of each template. Here are the Swiss cheese remains of my pattern printout:

It also felt weird to not have a block outline of Jane’s original design to color in and use for reference. It didn’t help that some of the patches were colored incorrectly on the Susan Gatewood pattern. It took a lot of checking and rechecking to make sure I had all the right pieces in all the right places.

Ever since I made the TR2 triangle block in this fabric and ended up with lopsided motif placement, I’m careful to fussy cut whenever I use this larger fabric print. I had hoped to use the white flowers in some of the pieces of this block, but the white flower motif was just too big to fit comfortably in any of the pieces.

I ultimately decided to have flower motifs only in the center section, and to just have leaves and vines in the other pieces. Which I think looks okay. I keep going back and forth on it.

Once I got everything cut out and marked, I started to stitch. First, I stitched each of the two oddball shapes together to make eight triangles:

Then I stitched sets of two center triangles together to make larger triangles, and assembled each of the corner sections:

But once these were done, I got stuck on what to do next. Should I assemble the center diamond shape and then add the corner triangles to it?

After much deliberation, I decided that I’d rather do the stitching on the bias with the smallest, least complicated units first, and do the stitching on the grain line at the end. So I stitched each larger center triangle to a corner triangle section. At that point, it was just a four-patch block, with nothing on the bias:

I’m making it sound simple here, but it felt like nothing was going right on this block. The small green triangles look like they have the point cut off when I press the seam allowance towards them, but it doesn’t really seem feasible to press away from them either. It was a no-win situation.

Still, I did my best to press the block into submission, took a photo, and then moved on to my next task: sashing it to nearby blocks. But it would not behave – there was so much to ease onto the sashing strips that I just could not make it work.

So, two days after finishing it, I picked out the last few seams I’d done on the block, reverting to four square units. Then I measured, trimmed, and re-marked each of those four units.

When I stitched them together the second time, it came out looking much better. The center didn’t try to bulge up like a volcano, and the sashing was not such a chore.

In the end, I think the block turned out okay. I’m still not particularly happy with my fussy cutting choices, and the last-minute trimming means they aren’t as consistent (a.k.a. fussy) as I’d like.

But it’s done. And I’m pretty thankful that I didn’t go with the crowd and do these blocks in order. Because if this was my first block instead of my 224th, I don’t think I would have made it nearly this far on the project.

Instead, here I am, finished with the penultimate block, and with only the “ultimate” block left to go!