Lancaster Diamond: And So It Begins

A few days before Christmas, I made the first block; it is the absolute easiest one in the book and I am delighted to report that I made no mistakes! It is the block in the middle of this trio, solid blue body with red star print wings. Spurred on by my success, I made the blocks on either side of that one.

Since I know and love the leader of the group that is forming next month, and since I see her on a pretty regular basis and text her enough to be annoying? every now and again, I already know that this project calls for many different techniques, some of which will be new to me.

The top three are paper pieced. Shout out to my relative, Susan, at whose suggestion some years back to try to learn something new at the rate of 80 minutes per week. I ended up spending much more than 80 minutes each week on this learning project but, by gum, I moved from "Paper piece? I'd rather give a cat a bath!" to a confident paper piecer.

For this project, I'm drafting blocks myself, something I've not done before, but what the heck. Being married to an architect has produced a newly-recognized fringe benefit: Bumwad! While the word sounds like a euphemistic substitute for something one really shouldn't say, it actually is a super thin, super crackly, semi-transparent tracing paper used in the architecture field. A roll of bumwad has migrated from the drawing table (shhhh, don't tell!) to the Bernina area and is becoming my new best friend!

The two lower diamonds are appliqué blocks. One of the quilting techniques I've attempted but never got any good at, is appliqué, needle-turn or otherwise. I love to hand button-hole stitch and that's my method of choice when appliqué is called for. During my "primitive piecing" phase, this worked out just fine. Now I find myself regretting that I never developed the skill. My mentor tells me that on this project the original makers didn't find wonky problematic. I may need to tattoo that someplace. This is not the time to try again to master needle-turn.

This block uses a combination of paper-piecing and appliqué techniques. The template for the diamond pattern includes a quarter-inch seam allowance (thank you, Ann Holte!). When I start to trace the block on the bumwad, I add roughly 3/8" to 1/2" inch for grace, and am careful on the outermost pieces to backstitch. When I'm done, I trim.

I'll be blanket-stitching this tonight and trimming tomorrow.