Fancy Forest QAL 2018 - Allie Owl blocks
Morning, and welcome back to my blog. I have finally finished all eight Allie Owl blocks. Like so many of the blocks in this quilt, they involved lots of cutting, small pieces and fiddly sewing! I decided to work on two sets of four - to make it seem more manageable and to enjoy the process more rather than just conveyor belt sewing.
As ever with these blocks, if you are sewing more than one owl at a time, organisation is key (there are 56 pieces for EACH owl!). I keep my colour chart nearby for reference and my fabrics in the same order for each pile. That means that you can chain piece easily and check that you are sewing the correctly coloured piece of fabric each time. I work on several parts of the block at the same time too so that I don't have to get up and down to the ironing board every minute - so I will sew all the squares around the eye plus the wing units and then trim, press and repeat.
I love the finished blue and grey owls, just my colours. I'm also really pleased with the odd little tweak I made to my colour plan - to make sure that I used solids around the eyes and small prints for the tummies. I wanted to avoid large prints that were badly pattern matched down the centre of the block.
As ever with these blocks, if you are sewing more than one owl at a time, organisation is key (there are 56 pieces for EACH owl!). I keep my colour chart nearby for reference and my fabrics in the same order for each pile. That means that you can chain piece easily and check that you are sewing the correctly coloured piece of fabric each time. I work on several parts of the block at the same time too so that I don't have to get up and down to the ironing board every minute - so I will sew all the squares around the eye plus the wing units and then trim, press and repeat.
I love the finished blue and grey owls, just my colours. I'm also really pleased with the odd little tweak I made to my colour plan - to make sure that I used solids around the eyes and small prints for the tummies. I wanted to avoid large prints that were badly pattern matched down the centre of the block.
Once I had finished the first four and had a little break from Fancy Forest sewing I started again with the next set. These four included a green plus pinks blending to purple. As with some of my previous blocks, I had all the pieces for these blocks cut up and next to machine so that I could feed them through as leaders and enders while I worked on other sewing. I find that the tedious sewing of the eyes (16 plus pieces!) is less of a bore if you just do it one at a time with another project.
And here are the final four...
Next up is the huge task of assembling the entire quilt. Cleverly, the pattern divides the quilt up into four quadrants, so you only have to assemble a quarter of the quilt at a time.
Although the quilt along is nearly at an end, I'm sure you can still find inspiration and tips over on the blogs and IG feeds of our hosts - Fiona, Abigail and Sharon.
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