and sew we craft | #modernQAL | escalator block

Back in April, the girls over at And Sew We Craft decided to host a year long quilt-along based on the book Modern Blocks. We all chose two blocks, picked the months we wanted to host, and started sharing them in May, one each month.

My block this month is called "escalator", designed by Ann Haley.

This is only the second-ever quilt block I've sewn, so please take no notice of the un-matching seams, I'm sure yours will be much neater! I also didn't trim it down before taking this photo (note to self: read instructions all the way to the end)

So I didn't get totally confused, I took a photo of my fabrics, and labelled them the same colours as are used in the book. I did have to refer to it at least twice!

Cut two 2 1/2" squares from the brown and pink fabrics, and one 2 7/8"square which is then cut diagonally.

Cut one 2 1/2"square from the blue and green fabrics, and two 2 7/8"squares, then cut diagonally.

Cut on 11" square from the muslin (I used the same white cotton I'm using for all my blocks), and then cut diagonally.

At this point, I had a few minutes before I was needed by the newbie, so I pinned the pieces together following the pattern from the book (this is where I consulted my labelled photo!)

I don't know if there's a "right way" to sew blocks, but I sewed all the triangles on one side, then swapped over to the other side, then pressed them out flat. Starting with the top two rows, I sewed one row at a time, and pressed at the end.

Now, if I'd read the instructions all the way to the end, I would have realised that this block gets trimmed down to 12.5", so the white triangles can be matched up on the top row, but I've got a bit of extra overhang.

I'm hoping that by the end of the year-long journey I'm much better at sewing neatly!

{I'll be catching up this month with the blocks so far, it felt good to be sitting at the sewing machine last week. Now if only I could get stuck into some scrapping as well!}