The Tattoo Quilt, block 4 —

 Hell hath no fury than a confused quilter.

Fury is the block and my fury rose while cutting the pieces for this one. Goodness gracious, this one required six hours of cutting the fabrics. 

I celebrated my birthday by spending the entire day in the studios. At 9:00 am I walked into the cutting room. I took a 20 minute break around noonish, went back to cutting and emerged at 3:15 pm with all pieces cut. Y’all, the cutting on this one is tedious.

I immediately moved into the sewing room and stitched sections A, B, C and D. The sewing sequence for each block begins with the banner word, which can be the most work for each block; it definitely has the tiniest seam lengths. The Hubs announced that my birthday dinner was ready as I finished Section D.

Part of my overthinking while working on this block was wondering if this would go faster using freezer paper instead of newsprint. I used freezer paper when piecing the Sharing the Process center panel and loved it. I may try it on another block.

See this fabric? It's a 1" square. And it did not need to be that big, but I don't like cutting anything smaller than an inch:

Because of the flames, I had to be really careful piecing those sections together, so here's my next tip: basting. First, for the larger pieces of fabrics on a section or when the first piece of a section is between two other pieces, I machine basted the piece to the paper for stability. Yes, I could have used glue, but I’m not using glue on this project. Second, I will baste a paper pieced seam -- NOT ON THE EXACT LINE BUT TO THE LEFT OR RIGHT OF IT. It's a hair from the printed seam line, but it can tell me if I'm on my game, or not so much. Once I’m happy with the placement, I will stitch the seam with the shorter stitches and then remove the basting. Finally, I baste around the edges of the completed section, and this has helped tremendously with stitching the sections together; it keeps things neater. I did it for this block and found it helpful. Did it take me longer to get it done? Sure. But for now I'm ahead of the game. Here's one of the sections where I machine basted the first piece of section R to the paper. It’s not a large piece, but it was helpful:

This block took me only one week to complete from cutting fabrics to block construction. It is the fiddliest block so far! But I do love it. It has the least amount of Tula Pink fabric in it because I liked what I used better. It happens.

Also, the week I completed this block I fell back into the Click Buy Now mood and bought another KIT! I have been crushing on Jennifer Sampou’s ombré fabrics and loved the log cabin quilt she made for her son. They’re kitting it now and it ships in July. It will look great in our living room or on the bed in the guest room. 

I have persevered through four blocks and am moving on to Block 5. Go make!