Monthly Archives: June 2015

As a member of ‘The Patchworkers and Quilters Guild of Victoria’, Leslie Edwards – a contemporary quilter – has organised a ‘block swap’ with a patchwork group in Africa. The brief included a block between 6″ and 12″, and ‘see what you can come up with’.

What to do? I thought I’d document the thoughts behind this block as part of the ‘Process Pledge’, so …

• what size to make …
• which method of construction …
• what pattern to use …
• which fabrics to select …
• what colours would be suitable …

So for the first block – let’s keep it simple. A 12″ block, pieced by machine, some Australian fabrics including a medium value burnt orange, a light aboriginal patterned fabric for the background, and a darker Leesa Chandler floral fabric as the feature.

Which pattern? It needed to be reasonably large pieces in the block to show the fabric designs, and I came across ‘Kentucky Chain’ by Maggie Malone in her book. Although I can do Y seams by hand, I thought I’d have a go at doing this one by machine instead.

‘500 Full-Size Patchwork Patterns’ by Maggie Malone

‘Kentucky Chain’ block.

Next was to draft the pattern up to a 12″ size.

So, the measurements came out to be an awkward size, and rather than cut out to within an 1/8th of an inch,  … there must be an easier way to make sure it remained accurate.

Get out the Freezer Paper

Clip a sheet over the pattern and start tracing.

After tracing the pattern, number and mark the pieces, and cut them apart.

Iron the freezer paper to the wrong side of the plain and background fabrics, cut them out and draw in the 1/4″ seam line ready for sewing.

I wanted to fussy cut the feature fabric, so …

Freezer paper ironed to the front of the feature fabric.

Fussy cutting wastes fabric and makes holes in it like ‘Swiss Cheese’!

Laying out the prepared pieces.

Time to sew. I used one of my favourite threads – Aurafil – for the piecing. As there was a significant amount of orange in two of the fabrics, my usual medium grey piecing threads showed up a tad more than was usual , so I did something I normally don’t do, I used a coloured thread instead. The challenge was to work out what pieces to sew into patches, and the order of sewing the patches, to keep the number of Y seams to a minimum.

A minimum of 8 Y seams in the block as seen from the back – there could have been as many as 20!

Circling the centre seam keeps the bulk of the fabric evenly distributed and flatter than ironing to one side.

The first block for the ‘African Block Swap’.

Now for the next one …