Pictures up- that troublesome quilt

OMG! That is fabulous! Congratulations!

Happy quilting,

Lenore

Here's a repeat of my post from last November. It answers the question about the pattern.

I'm working on a quilt. I think it's quite cool. It's based on floor tiles in the Moorish Palace, the Alhambra, in Grenada, Spain. The grid is 60 degrees, not the 90 degree blocks I'm used to. The pattern is in _Quilting Illusions_ by Celia Eddy.

The directions clearly say that you need ONE triangular block made exactly the same to fit together into hexagons that form the quilt. The illustrations show you how to draft that ONE block. Uh-uh. Only when you get around to making it and putting the pieces together do you discover that you need TWO blocks, the one shown, and its mirror image. That's not at all apparent when you look at the diagram and read the directions carefully.

I'm not normally a stickler. For that matter, I don't normally depend on the directions that much. I usually look at the diagram, glance at the directions, figure out how I'm going to make the quilt based on my own favorite methods, don't worry about how much fabric the pattern tells me I'm going to need because I'm glad to buy extra and Heaven knows there's enough fabric around here anyway. I wouldn't be raising a fuss over a little typo, but this error could be serious. You could have someone making 54 blocks one way when she really needed 27 of the one illustrated and 27 cut and sewn differently. There's no way to switch them after they've been sewn.

Working in 60 degrees is different for me, and the original and mirror image thing isn't readily apparent from the diagram. (Before anyone thinks I just missed it, when I got to the point where I was having trouble, I called Jim in, Jim the spatial and visual genius, and asked him to fit the pieces together so they matched the diagram. It took him several minutes of fiddling around before he came to the same conclusion I did. You just don't see it unless you study it and are looking for it.)

I'd call this a significant error. I'd like to save quiltmakers some grief, but I don't know how to let quiltmakers know. There's an address for the publisher (Barron's educational series) at the front of the book, and I'll write to them, but I thought I'd ask here for other ideas on how to get the word out.

--Lia

Don't mean to discourage you, but I just finished piecing my 5th scrappy top this year (and there's a long-term hand-sewn 6th one in progress, plus the rctq BOM), and the level in the Black Hole Scrap Basket has not diminished one bit. Roberta in D

"Boca Jan" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:nPudnQwfNvAg3tXVnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@comcast.com...

As I make one quilt or make blocks for a group project here and there, I throw the scraps in a shoe box. When I'm between projects, I go through the shoe box and cut everything down to squares. There's a plastic baggie for 2" squares, 2.5" squares, 3" squares and so on up to 6" squares. Strips in those sizes go in too. Larger pieces go back into the regular stash. Smaller pieces go into another shoebox. When that shoebox gets full, I give it to someone who wants it. So in one sense, I'm neat and organized.

It's the plastic baggies full of squares that keep growing. The idea was to have small scraps in a variety of colors on hand so I could go through them when I needed a little bit of a particular color. The reality is that I have overflowing baggies of squares.

The Road to Jericho quilt was perfect for using up squares. I used 2" squares for the 9-patches, then 4.5" squares for the triangles surrounding them.

I also now have some UFOs. One UFO is 9 blocks made up of different colored squares. That's a block of all different blue squares, green squares, etc. There's alos the UFO of the leftover Road to Jericho blocks. Plus those overflowing baggies.

--Lia

WOW. I love it. Does the pattern have a name? I'd like to add it to my to-do list.

Heather in West Oz

Here's everything I know about the pattern name. This is a repeat of a letter I wrote when I first ran into trouble with the pattern. --Lia

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My cousins said they'd like a quilt based on Spanish and Portuguese tile designs for their wedding quilt. Terrific, I knew nothing about those patterns and was looking forward to the challenge.

I learned that a lot of those designs are based on 60 degree triangles. Terrific, I've always worked with 90 degree square or rectangle blocks, and this new way of thinking was going to be fun.

I found a book at Barnes & Noble on interlocking quilt patterns with a pattern based on a design on the wooden screens that decorate the Moorish palace, the Alhambra, in Granada, Spain. Terrific, and it was on remainder. _Quilting Illusions: Create Over 40 Eye-Fooler Quilts_ by Celia Eddy, Barron's Educational Series, 2004. The quilt on page 94 is called Oriental Star Variation.

I took it home, saw that it used one triangular block, and got to work. It's tricky I realized, but doable, and fun. It was reminding me of when I first started quilting, how I thought I could never do the math, how I was sure I needed software, and how I quickly found that I could do everything I needed to with just graph paper and a calculator, if that. It didn't take long before I realized that with a little experience, I could make good guesses as to how much fabric I'd need, that my eye was getting better at seeing how things went together without having to have everything figured out in advance. Just keep working with the pattern, I told myself, until you get used to thinking in 60 degrees, and soon this will be as easy as making any square block.

Better than anything, this pattern uses only one block. If I did things the easy way, I'd make 54 of the same triangular block, but of course, I made things more complicated by using 3 stripe fabrics and 7 star fabrics. I marked on my photocopied page which interlocking blocks used which stripes and which diamonds that would make the star and got to work. I have to tinker with technique as well as fabrics and figured out that the block could be largely strip pieced in 2 strip sets. Terrific, I'm so clever, and I hate working with templates.

It was still tricky. I was wasting more fabric than I'm used to as I cut things the wrong way, but I was getting better at it. Remember how much fabric you used to waste when you first started, I told myself. This is no different.

And then, after many false starts and ripped out seams, I completed 6 blocks and set them up on the design wall. It didn't work. It looked like I must have sewn the pieces together on the wrong side, but after checking and rechecking the directions, it sure looked like I got them right. I called Jim in to identify what was wrong.

The result? The instructions are wrong! The instructions say to make

54 of the same triangular block, no mirror images, but in the diagram, there ARE mirror images. If you don't make them, it doesn't go together properly. This is difficult to see under any circumstance and impossible to see if you've never worked with interlocking 60 degree triangles before. I could only see this after I'd gotten out the paper scissors and cut the diagram apart.

I rarely work with a pattern anymore. I usually do my own drafting, and on that occasion when I do use a pattern from a book, I end up going heavily by the diagram and redrawing on graph paper because it's easier for me to understand that way. I tend to ignore instructions, but I was paying strict attention to these because I was learning something new. And they were wrong!

All is not lost. I'll back up, count which blocks need to be mirror images, do some ripping and resewing and will make this work. At least I didn't make all 54 blocks before trying them on the design wall. (Terrific, I'm impatient to see how things will look.)

Brilliant, but that's the physics explanation. You've left out the biological one. Scraps breed in the night.

--Lia

But the truth is - I'm quite fond of my scrap bin. If someone came through and said they were going to carry away my yellow (the favorite here) stash, that would be fine. It would be easy enough to replace, but the Black Hole scrap bin? Mercy no. That's a challenge I'll never conquer but it's always fun to try. Polly

"Roberta Zollner" Way more organized than I am -but my Basket isn't particularly large. It's