FWQAL Week 6—Blocks #1, 29, 84

My date with the farmer came a bit early last week: I sewed these three blocks early Friday afternoon. But then on Saturday, we left home at 6:30am to travel down to NYC for the day (5-hours each way for a combined car/train trip) to visit dear friends and see Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the Met. If you can make it there by this Sunday, Aug. 7, I highly recommend seeing the exhibit. It was wonderful and worth the 2-hour line, in my estimation. I’d never been to the Met, but now look forward to returning to view more of their permanent collections someday. I don’t plan on another day trip down though—it was a bit brutal. But anyway, we did that, arrived at home just a few minutes shy of midnight, and I proceeded to laze around doing nothing more than light cleaning and binge reading for the next two days. So, finally, here are my week 6 blocks.

#1 — Attic Windows

Simplify the block

Still foregoing templates, this block was tricky, but not impossible to piece by rotary cutting. However, since it ended up about ¼” short on one side and a bit wide on the other, I’m not sure if I did the math incorrectly and sewed my seams a little too generously, or if the math was just plain wrong. If you want to try, according to my math, the trapezoidal pieces can be cut from a 2.5″ × 7 7⁄8″ strip. Measure in 2.5″ from each side, and cut between the two marks at a 45° angle. The other pieces are a 2.5″ square, 4 7⁄8″ HST, and 2 7⁄8″ HST.

If you pieced this without templates and had different measurements, please share!

I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to try to remake the block, make it work with 1⁄8″ allowances, or see if a little blocking can stretch it out a bit. I haven’t been squaring up any of my blocks as I go along—I’m waiting to do so when I’ve finished them all, so I can see what needs to be done across the board. So far, with the exception of this block, they’ve all turned out pretty square and right at 6.5″.

#29 — Economy

Though I haven’t yet mentioned it, I have read the letters as I work along on these blocks. The letter that accompanied Economy (page 96), like many, talked about the business partnership between the farmer and his wife, but also about the children. The author described the mix of responsibility and playfulness during childhood in such a way that I knew these two grey-background prints from Sherbert Pips were required in the block. I had a charm pack packed away for a rainy day, but couldn’t help using three of the squares for this.

Simplify the block

When rotary cutting, the outer triangles must be HSTs so that the edges of the block are on-grain, otherwise putting the top together could get quite tricky. When I cut this, the inner triangles are actually a QST (since that is what template #12 is used as for the other blocks I’ve done), so the bias edges are being sewn to bias edges—careful piecing is a must with those stretchy bits.

#84 — Spool

Simplify the block

This is just a collection of 2.5″ squares and 2 7/8″ HSTs, if you’d like to rotary cut the block, but pay extra attention to the direction of your prints when making the spool. No special cutting is needed, since you’re working with squares, just rotate them the proper way before cutting the HSTs.

What is this all about?

A group of quilters are working their way through The Farmer’s Wife Sampler Quilt by Laurie Aaron Hird, trying to complete two blocks a week and posting them all to the group Flickr pool.

Check out our progress:

You can see all of my progress on my Farmer’s Wife Quilt page.