Two more blocks of the Round the Year quilt done today, using the porthole method described by Sobana Sundar in a previous blogpost.
The first was Card Trick, Block Three, which got done quickly.
The other block that I did was Wedding Ring, which gave me a lot of trouble as I did not glue the background correctly. The resultant seam ranged from 1/8″ to 3/4″. I had to rip it and re-do it.
I was not very happy with the end result. For the next block, I will do something different. I will mark the seam line on the front of the circle, and glue the background accurately from the top, using the seam line as a guide. I will take pics to clarify what I mean.
Meanwhile, I had promised to show you how I stitched the background with no fabric wastage.
In the normal course, one would stitch together two rectangles 9.5″x 18.5″ in the two blues ( along the longer edge, and end up with an 18.5″ circle. On this one would mark a 7.5″ circle and cut about 3/4″ inside that.
What I did was this…
I ironed the templates on the background fabric and cut out a further 1/4″ inside. I also took an extra 1/8″ on the outer long edges. I will trim the blocks to accurate size once they are done. Remember, NOT to take and extra allowance on the small straight edge! That has to be exactly 1/4″.
You need 10.5″ x 12.5″ fabric for 2 quarters as above. Which means that for one block you need either 10.5″ x 25″ or 21″x 12.5″, depending on how you place the templates.
I then cut out the freezer paper template described by Sobana in her post – an 18.5″ square with a 7.5″ radius circle cut out of the centre. I pieced my background using two light blues and two darks directly on this template.
You will need to probably refer to Sobana’s post on setting circles onto background squares to understand exactly what I did differently here…
If you have any questions, please feel free to seek clarifications!
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