Over the weekend I finished the second block I had promised for Kates charity quilt. I’m pretty pleased with this one as it’s one I ‘designed’ myself, rather than just finding a pattern someone else has written out…it is however a pretty simple block 😀

I pulled out all the teal and ocean blue colours I had in my batik drawer, which turned out to be quite a pile!I wanted lots of half square triangles in all the different shades, with some fishes swimming along too. I decided I wanted to end up with 6×6 2″ squares once it was stitched, so I cut out lots of 3″ squares and made pairs of half square triangles which I could then trim to size.

The fishes are made from quarter square triangles so I cut 3.5″ squares. Initially I made the fishes in a lovely orange batik which did look good, they were fun!.. but then I happened to see the post of blocks Kate has already received, my orange fishes were going to stand out a mile!

At this point the block was just laid out on my wool mat. I decided to give Kate the choice of fishes or no fishes – I loved the block without the fishes too. Just after e-mailing her I remembered she wanted blue as an accent if we needed one, I found some nearly electric blue batik, so I offered blue fish and that’s what we went with. Much more subtle but still there.

I stitched the blocks together with the chain technique where you don’t actually cut the threads between blocks, whilst it made it a little fiddly for ironing, it did make piecing pretty easy. You can just see the threads in between all the blocks on the above photo.

Here’s my finished block, I also realised that it could go either way up, depending on which way Kate wants the fishes to swim! It’s already posted, swimming across to Australia.