Block Play: hearts

Hello, everyone.

The baby quilt will have varied sizes of squares. Some of them are 4" squares, which while somewhat small is a common size and useful for dotting like confetti throughout the arrangement of larger blocks.

I had sketched out a 4" pieced heart design, and stitched up the first one as the lines on my graph paper suggested. It was almost like the heart blocks to be found on Pinterest, with lots of pieces. (I guess those ladies are working from 2" units, not 1"--as their blocks don't have the wonkiness I found in the many seams.)

This was going to be irregular and unpredictable, just because of the many small blocks and seams. I commenced to exploring ways to reduce the number of seams. The first heart was on a gray background.

The first block, on the left, and the second, on the right.

 The first change tried was to switch to two larger half-square triangles for the bottom part of the heart. This improved things a little, but there were still a lot of seams on the top. The many overlapping, angled seams make the final assembly difficult.

I tried again, this time using a technique with half the number of vertical seams.

Tracing the seam lines on the small squares.

 I cut some squares and strips to a wee bit larger, giving room for the angles: 1 7/8" inch instead of 1 1/2". This was to allow for trimming later.

Here the sewing line is being drawn on the back of the white squares. To the right, a drawn seam positioned on top of the strip as it will be sewn.

The strips, sewn, before assembly into the top portion of the
heart. (Face up on left, face down on right)

After sewing the two strips with squares at each end. There is excess fabric at the top, but trimming will wait for one more seam to be sewn: the center vertical seam.














All three of the heart blocks, from oldest to newest.







As the use of many different fabrics isn't one of the purposes of each individual heart block here, I'll try to stick with the third method of assembly.