Monday 2 January 2012

My first snail trail block!

Over the last two or three nights, I put together my four-patches for my High Seas quilt - so now its 'just' a matter of putting them all together. Phew. This one just took me nearly 1 1/2 hours to finish (and I think I'll need to redo it anyway...) - and there are 42 blocks all together, so its going to be a fairly labour intensive exercise. I hope its worth it - its still a little hard to work out if its going to look ok or not.


Only problem is they are meant to finish at 9" (so 9 1/2" unfinished) - and this one is very close to 10". I'm really not used to this - usually my 'tricky' blocks finish small, so I'll need to work out what's going on. You can probably see the points don't all quite match up - so obviously I've gone wrong somewhere in my piecing. Not sure where - I used really accurate 1/4" seams. I did press my seams open though (which caused a lot of bulk in some places) so the next one I'm going to press them toward the triangles, and see if that makes a difference with matching the points, and getting the size right.

If anyone has experience making these blocks, some tips on how you pressed them would be appreciated. I have become used to pressing seams open (I really like the sharper seams I get doing it that way) - but I am thinking it might be better to press to one side for these blocks, to reduce bulk where the points meet...

Off to try another one and see if I can get it to work!

I'm linking up to Manic Monday at Sew Happy Geek (also go check out her QAL starting very, very soon! It's going to be fun!)


Sew Happy Geek

happy stitching,
Jess

5 comments:

needle and nest said...

What a great block, especially for a first attempt! I haven't attempted anything this complex yet. Maybe this year! :)

Melissa said...

What a great block! I saw your post on the Manic Monday linky party and thought "I saw that blue/circle dot material in the GenX quilt along" and when I arrived at your blog, I realized you had done the QAL too, LOL :)

I find that with triangles my blocks don't come to the right size too. Maybe it has something to do with that they are cut on the bias so are more stretchy when they are sewn. I haven't figured it out yet!

MC said...

This block is one that I did in a recent quilting course. According to my instruction sheet, you should always press towards the triangles. Hope that helps!

Carla said...

Aren't those such fun to make! Great fabrics and it realy makes the block move.

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