It’s not as easy as it looks to design your own quilt block!!

I wanted to make one more block for Kate Chiconia’s Tealed with a Kiss quilt, it’s going to raise money for ovarian cancer charities, hence the teal colour as that is the colour that represents ovarian cancer, a bit like pink for breast cancer.

With my first block I’d struggled to find teal coloured fabrics in the local shops, so when I went to the Harrogate quilt show it was something I was keeping my eye out for. I ended up with five potential fabrics.

The 12.5″ block needed to have a X incorporated in the design and my initial idea was to do two large log cabin blocks, cut them in half diagonally and then rearrange to make a cross shape. I drew it out on paper, however I decided I preferred to have squares in the centre with log cabin borders going outwards. In the end I decided to make four squares using a sort of log cabin, stitch them with the cross in the middle and then trim. OK it meant wasting the other half of the triangle, but I can save them to use another time.

Trimming the squares

I measured diagonally across the squares, added another strip and then thought it was big enough. I stitched the squares together with the ivory X, unfortunately I didn’t allow extra fabric at the end of my strips for the corners, I was still in log cabin mode!!

When I came to trim it two of the corners were short!. I debated whether to put another border round the whole block, but in the end I decided to add a triangle to the corner of each block, it might be that after quilting the corners are trimmed off and disappear, if not at least they all match!

Both squares are going in the post tomorrow, flying off to Australia, hoping they look OK with all the others! It looks really blue in the photo below, but it is teal coloured, I promise! I’ll keep all my teal fabrics together so next year I can be a bit more organised.