Here We Go! Eight Carat Quilt Along Part 1
When it comes to shopping for quilting supplies, I don’t have a lot of option locally, so I have to do my shopping online, and have had to since I started exploring quilting about 9 years ago. One place I’ve been ordering from consistently is the Fat Quarter Shop. Not only am I a Sew Sampler Box member (and have been since the first box), but I give them major props for the way they work to connect with their customers. They have great blog content, fantastic tutorials and live videos, and having spoken to their customer service on the phone (and I dread having to use the phone), they are top notch. They recently released the Triangles on a Roll Quilts Book to go along with their Triangle Paper by It’s Sew Emma. Since my half square triangle skills are decidedly lacking, I decided to give their Eight Carat Quilt Along a go. The quilt along uses their triangle paper in 3” and 4” finished sizes and two patterns from the Triangles on Roll Quilts Book.
I had big plans for using some fabric from my stash, but when I got ready to starch the fabric, I realized that the fabric I thought was fat quarters were very much not. Plan B came in the form of fat quarters that were in the October 2017 (yikes!) Sew Sampler Box, Tula Pink’s Spirit Animal. Usually if I want to create the project that comes in the box, I’ll purchase the rest of the fabric. For this one, I didn’t purchase the fabric, so this collection was just open stash. I made a plan, which I’ll share more about in a future post, chose my fabrics, starched, and got to work.
I’m a fan of foundation paper piecing. I have a tendency to be a bit of a lazy quilter/sewer sometimes. More of a 90-percenter, if you will (plus a little Angela Walters “finished is better than perfect” thrown in for good measure), so when I have something that gives me seemingly perfect blocks. So, I set out to stock my fabric and pin the paper on top.
Next, I took it over to my sewing machine, my trusty Janome DC2011 that doesn’t have a fancy name other than “my sewing machine” and started stitching. Using the recommended 1.5 stitch length I followed the arrows along the dotted lines. Easy peasy!
Once that was complete, I cut the pieces on the solid line and ended up with 32 perfect half square triangle in two colorways. I will admit that peeling the paper always makes me nervous. I’m afraid that I’m just going to yank out the stitches, so I’m extra careful when doing that.
The directions suggest trimming off the “ears,” so I did. I tried it two ways, the first was lining up a ruler and using my rotary cutter, and the second was just taking my fabric scissors to the tiny triangles. I decided that the scissors was the better option for me, plus I could step away from the sewing room to finish that part of the project.
I laid out the block, which is quite sizable, and it mostly fit on my table, and set out to sew the individual blocks together followed by the rows. My seam ripper and I did make friends a couple of times, but it mostly went quite well. As the block started coming together, I will admit, I was getting pretty giddy about how nicely it was coming out. I finished the final seam and gave it a nice press (all of the seams are pressed open in this block). There are a couple of places where everything doesn’t match up quite as nicely as I would hope for, but overall, I’m incredibly happy with this giant block! What do you think?
