Here is a block from Sujata Shah’s book, Cultural Fusion Quilts. Her process for making it is not what I expected it to be from looking at the finished quilt. She takes a stack of four 7″ squares of fabric, and stacks them dark, light, dark, light- or blue, red, blue, red. In mine I’m treating red and yellow as if they are the same color, since both are light. She then cuts off the corner triangle from all four sides, kind of like making a snowball block. Then she moves the top corners to the bottom of each stack, and sews red triangles to the blue squares and blue triangles to the red squares. This makes a wonky snowball block, which is squared up and cut in half both horizontally and vertically, to make four smaller squares, each with a small or large triangle of the other color. Then you sew all 16 squares together, and you get a “wave” block like the one I pieced above. I really like how the colors shift across the block.
Now that I’ve made it, I don’t actually have any plans for it. It will probably go into my M.O.E.S. box. M.O.E.S. stands for mistakes, orphans, extras and samples. When I need a quick present for someone, I go to the M.O.E.S. box and turn something in there into a quick pillow, potholder or small quilt.
I’m not usually a fan of fussy cutting, but sometimes it’s what you need to do. I decided I wanted four squares with this ball/flower in the middle. Now I remember why I don’t like fussy cutting! There’s too much wasted fabric.
On the right are the squares. All the fabric on the left is not usable for this block. Of course I won’t throw anything away. I’ll save it for another project.
Here it is, done!
