Almost done with BOM blocks!

I have been doing about a block a night on these BOM blocks...I have now officially completed all 12 but since one disappeared in the mail I will have to create a 13th block to finish the top off.  These have been really fun because they are very quick and easy and you get that satisfaction of completing one pretty frequently.  These last few blocks have had their share of headaches, but it's still been fun.

First we will start with the ones that did go right:

Okay, now for the two that were trouble.  This flower block was a nighmare, and it was completely my fault. I was being lazy, and screwed up the whole thing so many times on so many levels.

First, you will note three different spots where I had to patch in more fabric because the pieces I was using weren't long enough. Which I would have realized if I had been measuring more carefully.

The light blue strip was made from scraps, and they were about half an inch shorter than requested. So I said "no problem, I'll just make the green strips half an inch wider" which was all well and good, but then I cut the yellow half an inch thinner for that block which did NOT work because it was sewn on the diagonal, and really needed to probably be like 1/4" smaller or something. So I had to patch it.

THEN I had to patch that green chunk not once but twice to eke out enough fabric (these are almost all scraps from other blocks. Then, I got to the very end (see below), and it was not square! In fact, one side was a FULL INCH longer than the other. What??? Well it turns out in my typical laziness, I hadn't fully trimmed one of the blocks early on. I do this a lot (see the green chunk below as an example) and figure I will jsut trim that part off after it's sewn. Well in this case I forgot and as a result the whole thing is lopsided. Luckily because the flower is diagonal it's actually not as obvious as it could be that the whole thing is wonky.

Okay, then we come to today's block. I didn't like the block for the 11th month, so I made up my own. I found one on pinterest, and found the directions for it (see here), but the directions didn't include anywhere what the finished block size was, so I needed to basically make up my own directions. It was pretty easy once I sat down with some graph paper. Things were going swimmingly until I went to line up my HSTs with the edge of the current block and they were too small, by 1/2"!! Eek! What could I have done wrong??

Well it came down to the HST paper I printed out. I didn't bother to double check that one inch was one inch...I just eyeballed it.  Turns out, it was about 1/8" shy of one inch...doh!

So I ended up trimming down that white/purple sashing to match the triangles.  Here is the finished block.  The problem now is that it is 12" and needs to be 12.5." Boo.

I think what I will do is basically add a really thin border around the outside in that white/purple fabric. It will look obviously like a patch because it will only be 1/4" on each side, but oh well. It should help tie things together a bit more. That grey didn't work as a background as well as I had hoped.

Anyways, I'm not really discouraged by these errors because I see this quilt as a learning process, and I'm pumped to be back in the swing of quilting. So pumped that I bought another layer cake! Not sure what I will do with it, but I have enjoyed working with these 10" squares and think they are pretty darn versatile. Plus the new layer cake is only shades of two colors instead of a million like this one, so it will be easier to make a more cohesive quilt with it. I will post photos when it arrives in the mail!