Journal Notes

I started with the Blackberry Quilt pattern by Tiny Orchard Quilts (I’m including a photo of her pattern in pink), but played around with the layout on EQ8 so it is quite different than hers. I wanted to do an aqua border but didn’t have enough of the right color on hand so I brain stormed and came up with this extra row of blocks around the edge. I like it so much more than a plain border. Sometimes my best ideas come from “making do”! This is my second time making drunkards path blocks and the first time in about 8 years. Because I was rusty and really never got that good at it my first time, I did most of it one block at a time. I kept watching YouTube videos on drunkards path and would try out all the tips i gleaned, one at a time, so i could figure out what worked best for me. My first blocks weren’t coming out that great and I was very frustrated , but by the time I got to the last set of 8, they were turning out beautifully. I learned a lot and really improved my skills. To cut my pieces, I used the templates in the above photo. I cut 4.5” squares for the pie pieces and 5” squares for the crusts. If you wanted a pie and crust piece from the same fabric, you could have less fabric waste by tucking the pie piece into the crust but I wanted to use as many fabrics as possible. I ended up with a lot of smaller pie pieces cut out of the crust. Cutting the pie pieces left a bunch of small corners which I cut down into small triangles and I’m using them as leaders and enders to make 1.5” HST’s. To cut the crusts, I lined up the short ends of the template along two sides of the 5” fabric square. This gave me about 1/2” extra to trim after sewing, so that I could get a quarter circle whose corners are 1/4” from the edge. It’s important to cut the crusts about a half inch bigger than your final trimming when you want the circles to come all the way to the seam allowance so that you have something to hang onto when sewing the curve. Before making this quilt I thought I needed a special template to make this style of DP block but now I realize all you have to do is use a regular template and cut it down so you have 1/4” seam allowance at the corners. You just have to figure out how big of a square to start with for your crust so that you don’t have a ton of waste but still have enough to hang onto. I used Acorn seam align glue on the ends of the pieces instead of pins all the way across that short straight edge. This was a big help because I couldn’t get pins to keep that corner in place. I folded each curved edge in half and pressed a little crease there to mark the center. Then I folded the ends to the center and pressed two more creases. I pinned the pieces together in the 3 spots. I took my time with the sewing, only going about 5 stitches at a time and readjusting the fabric with my Purple Thang (plastic stiletto). I tried very fine pointed tweezers but the Purple Thang worked better. I sewed the blocks with the crust on top and pie on bottom My blocks were coming out too small until I started pressing toward the pie. I finger pressed the seam, then used the seam roller, THEN gently pressed it with the iron. The blocks lay much nicer pressed to the pie and there is less bulk when assembling the rows. I trimmed the blocks using my 4.5” square ruler, lining up the corners of the pie on the 1/4” line as shown in the above photo. I am making this quilt immediately after reading “Jinny Beyer’s Color Confidence for Quilters”. I did the exercises in the book and I think it really helped me in coming up with a pleasing palette, as challenging as that is working with mostly scraps. Because this quilt has to be symmetrical for the design to work, I had to find big enough pieces to get either 4 or 8 pieces from. There are 16 pieces cut from a thrifted pillowcase. I based the palette for the quilt off of this large print. Some fabrics are the same colors as those in the focus fabric, while others are darker, lighter, or brighter. I made sure to include the neutrals that are in the print. 8/9/26: started assembling my columns. It is tricky to get the seam allowance the perfect width so that the circles kiss the edge. I got it too small in the beginning and had to rip a bunch of them apart and resew. It’s probably best to use a 2.5 stitch length for assembling the rows and columns in case you have to resew. A shorter stitch length in the curves will make them smoother though. 8/15/26: finished the quilting. I couldn’t come up with any clever designs for these weird shapes so I decided on a simple orange peel. As this is a baby quilt, I think it was the right choice. It shouldn’t be stiff and it is sure nice to get the quilting done in a few days instead of a few weeks! I used my 4” clamshell ruler, which worked beautifully on these 4” blocks. Used 80/20 batting. Cut bias binding at 2.25” which was just right. Binding turned out really well on this one. Did not get any stitches on the binding on the front of the quilt when sewing it down by machine on the back, YAY! I have no one to give this to yet so it will sit in a drawer waiting.