Sherbet & Creams Quilt Along #3

Hello Friends!

Surely hope that you have been enjoying the process of our Sherbet & Creams Quilt Along. For those of you are just joining us, scroll back through a few posts to see the other posts and instructions and feel free to join us! This will not be a complicated or very involved quilt so everyone can join!

We have been buried under Market prep around here for what feels like forever… I know I exaggerate… but doesn't it kinda help sometimes to exaggerate? Just saying. 

We still have people receiving their solids bundles and grabbing up new cream/low volume bundles as fast as we can make them. So I have been trying to slow down my posts a little bit in the hopes that as many people have a chance to catch up as possible. If you have been wondering if "its too late", its not, its never too late so come on over and join us! Really!

We will also have to take a little Market break here soon so bear with me on the timing in the midst of May. I most certainly will not forget about you… and it will give many of you more time to catch up. I will definitely try to get one more step in before I leave for SLC so don't worry too much!

Okay so here't the next step:

1. Add a pumpkin seed shape to each 4-patch on the diagonal.
2. Here are some tips for doing that successfully:  for the lighter colors, or any of the colors for that matter, that seem to show the fabric through from the bottom, we created little cream "insets". What I mean by this is that if you have backgrounds that have stronger prints on them [in our case this was primarily true of the black dots and red twigs], those motifs might show right through your pumpkin seed shape. That will not make you happy when you are finished. So in order to avoid said unhappiness, we just traced and cut the pumpkin shape without a seam allowance onto plain ivory fabric. We then tucked that "inset" inside the turned shape and used a few dots of glue or your favorite glue stick [quickly falling in love with the Sewline Fabric Glue Pen but more on that later] to secure it. Its quite fast and we have found that sometimes with larger appliqué pieces that have fabric underneath, it is well worth the few extra minutes of work.
3. We then found our fabulous box of FIG TREE AURIFIL THREADS, found the color that most closely matched our pumpkin seed and used that thread to topstitch the pumpkin seed to the 4-patch.
4. As many of you have asked, you can of course also appliqué these seeds down. We just prefer the speed and durability of this method. We plan on picnicking with this quilt a lot this summer!
5. It just comes about 1/4" shy of each corner. Although remember that the corners are pretty much irrelevant as they will get completely covered up by the next  step. Normally we would worry about getting those corners perfectly but we aren't doing any worrying here at all!!

That's it for this step. If you are altering the size and not doing all 80 4-patches, you will need these in groupings of 4. Meaning that the final block will use four of these 4-patches. We will be using 80 of them for our quilt but if you are looking to make less, these are the increments that you could make:  64 blocks for a square quilt or 48 blocks for a smaller quilt altogether. 

NOW FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE STILL PANICKING BECAUSE THIS IS AN APPLIQUE SHAPE. A COUPLE THOUGHTS FOR YOU….

As you can see above, no actual appliqué is involved :-)) . Really you should try this…. are you buying it? Have I convinced you? Look at some of the comments of folks who are surprised at how easy it is….

Okay but moving on. Here is the alternative. We are not in love with it, but it will be along the same vein as what we are doing here… or at least as close as I can get it in my brain right now! It should be pretty cute although a bit more angular than the pumpkin seeds.

1. Instead of cutting pumpkin seeds, cut your SHERBET SOLIDS into 2 1/2" strips. Cut them up into 2 1/2" x 12" pieces. if you are making all 80 pieces, you will need 27 different strips since you can cut 3 pieces from each strip.
2. Cut your 4-patche apart in half on the diagonal.
3. Center and insert one of the 12" long pieces in the center and sew to one of the halves. Once you have done that, trim up the corners of the solid piece with the tip of your ruler so that each end comes to a corner of your block. Try as hard as you can to make sure that your trim is centered on the solid piece so that your block is even [but don't worry if you are a bit off]!
4. Add the other half of the 4-patch to the other side as shown, centering it on the solid piece that you just inserted into the center. Your finished block should be app. 7 1/2" but I would wait to trim up all your squares at once, when you are done with all of them. That way you can see what most of your blocks are turning out to be and make them work together.

… the actual center piece will be longer than this one, this was just all I had here in front of me LOL!

… I pieced one and then had to rip it apart to show you what it will look like so that is why the ends of the second half looked trimmed off.

We will post better/ more specific pics on this tomorrow. This is all I had right now and I wanted to get this post up here for those of you who have been patiently waiting for the next step! If this alternative doesn't make any sense, don't worry, more tomorrow.

If you are following along on INSTRAGRAM, use the hashtag #sherbetandcreamsquiltalong and #sherbetsandcreamquiltalong because people are using both!

Okay that's it for now.  Bye, Joanna