Nearly a year ago, near the end of one of my care-giver breaks, I made 35 scrappily planned Trip Around the World blocks. Without a home or drawer or closet into which I could shove them once done, they lurked atop any stable surface on my cutting area. Until yesterday.
Looking for something easy to stitch together, I decided to grab that pile, forgo any previous ideas of grouping like fabrics to create subsections of control and order within the inherent scrappiness, divide the pile roughly in half, and sew together pairs of blocks with abandon. Let's hear it for spontaneity!
Except...
the blocks wouldn't cooperate.
The first pair under the needle wouldn't nestle, no matter how I turned them. The seam allowance on top went down, as did the allowance on the bottom. Would all the blocks do that? What about all the careful and consistent ironing I did while making these? Did that count for nothing? Is my design/layout to blame?
Rather than continue, I grabbed all the blocks and headed back to the cutting area (the largest lay-out surface in the room) to see if every pair was going to behave like this, or if there were some that would play nicely together and nestle as they were supposed to. There were--all but one found a mate--and I ended up going from 35 blocks to 17 pairs.
From 17 pairs, 4x4 blocks were constructed making a red diamond pattern. (I remembered, this time, finally, to NOT sew all the pairs together into 4x4 blocks--some pairs would be needed to create the 5th column and the 7th row). Once again, though, I had to carefully find pairs that would nestle with each other. Once again, I was lucky that 12 pairs worked together to form six 4x4 blocks.
While I sewed, I wondered and pondered. Why? Why didn't everything nestle nicely as it should? And I started to remember the construction of these blocks, and how cavalier I was in laying out the initial strips.
"Diagonals is diagonals", I was thinking. What difference if I started with the red square in the top left or bottom left corner? As long as the red diagonal went to its opposite corner and I didn't mess up the layout of the other fabrics along the way, the block would work.
Except when it didn't. I made no effort at all to make them all the same, and probably made just as many starting with the red square in the top left corner as I did with it in the bottom left, as above. That's the only thing I can think of that would cause the seams to not nestle when sewn, but I haven't done controlled testing of this theory. Does giving the block a 1/4 turn to make the diamond pattern throw things off even if everything is done exactly the same? I'll pay close attention when I make my next set of these TATW blocks (I've still got enough N1C strips cut for 2-3 more quilts!) and have the answers for us both.
Eventually, as I knew it would, came the time in construction when I was forced to deal with non-nestling seam allowances. I thought perhaps I'd iron those seams open. However, some of these fabrics are heavy, and the idea of even 2 layers of them was more than I wanted to have to deal with when it came time to quilt this. So I chose to create some 'enforced (but consensual) nesting' along some of the seams.
I clipped up to the seams, but not through. I'll rely on the quilting to further stabilize these areas and it should be just fine.
The final 5 pairs and a single block were attached to two edges and a corner of the 6x4 layout (with more enforced nestling) to make a completed 5x7 top, measuring roughly 60"x84" (5'x7', of course). It's too big to hang on my design wall for a photo op, but the 6x4 shot above gives a pretty good idea of what it looks like. When it's finished I'll fling it on the front lawn or clip it to the back fence for a "Ta da it's done!" photo.
Now there are more 2.5" N1C strips calling out for my attention, 'cause I've got some research-in-block-construction to do!
EDIT:
Maybe it's not me! I just went to the source of this pattern and read this:
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