Block #1, part 2

So, on to the much awaited instructions for the block from the V&A museum! I've finally found the time to sit down and put this sucker together, by which I mean I sacrificed about 2 or 3 hours of sleep to piece together the zillion little pieces, then write this blog entry for you. I don't know why I'm complaining, though, considering I made up this pattern. In the course of putting it together, I discovered that there's in fact a perfectly reasonable 6” block to be had from this pattern, with the entire 16” block being 4 of those little blocks, with a little extension and sashing added. I'll try to remember to take a picture of what I'm talking about and post it for you.

Regardless, to take your zillion little pieces and make them into something gorgeous, your first order of business is to take 4 of your red squares and your one yellow square, and lay a black 1.5” square over each corner and sew across the diagonal to make a black triangle cutting off the corner of the square



Repeat this for each of the four corners, creating 5 squares within squares.



Note that you wont get those nifty little dog ears, because I was doing my black triangles differently (a more difficult way, I realized) in order to conserve fabric. Repeat this process for the 4 yellow rectangles around all four corners. Finally do this as well for the remaining red pieces (12 rectangles and 8 squares) but for these only do two adjoining corners to yield a house sort of shape



At this point you'll have three layers of fabric at each of the corners of your pieces. Depending on how well your points match up with that of the original rectangle (in a perfect world, your new pieced block will be exactly the same size and shape as the original), you can do one of two things. If your points match up exactly, or very close to exactly, you can cut away the back two layers (one black and one colored; to a quarter inch seam) to eliminate bulk behind the corners. If your points aren't behaving as well as you may like, you can only cut out the middle layer of fabric (a black layer) to eliminate some of the bulk, but also to leave yourself the guide of the original rectangle.

Iron all of your pieces, then lay them out as they appear in the picture of the block. I wouldn't recommend trying to figure out how the pieces fit together as you go along, because with all of the differently sized and shaped pieces, you're bound to make a mistake somewhere.

The way I went about it was to assemble four units of nine pieces each (the red units in the four corners) then attach the yellow pieces as I would sashing, yielding the finished product that I haven't quite finished yet, but will finish and photograph as soon as possible. As you work through this, make sure that you iron your pieces as you go along, because it will make your life several times easier in making sure that everything comes together. And pat yourself on the back; this was no simple task!