Is it Possible to Have too Much Icky Green?

These are the blocks that I have made so far as examples for my beginning quilt class. I usually keep most of them at the office for teaching purposes, so this was the first time I had put them all up together on the design wall.

The first thing I noticed was that there was too much of that acid/icky green. Not that you can really have to much of it, but I need to use more of the purse conversational with the black background in the future blocks (still have a fusible applique’, a foundation pieced block and some others to complete) and well as the tone-on-tone blue dot.

This is definitely a good example of why you should look at your quilt blocks before you finish them and put them together. I am not Paula Nadelstern who works on a tiny table and never looks at the whole quilt while it is in process. She is a genius and I strive to be like her.

I made one of the alternate blocks, the Nosegay, and had a lot of trouble which taught me to not slack on the templates. As some background, I was trying to print templates and HP Mobile printing, which never worked properly anyway, had taken over all the print functions on my computer. This prevented me from printing from
EQ5 directly. Always one to revert to pencil and paper, I drew out the block with pencil and paper and made the templates on graph paper. It went together fine until I got to the cone part of the block. The two background pieces were obviously too small.

Here is a detail of my transgressions. ;-0

I checked the template with the fabric and they matched. I couldn’t figure out the problem, then work got busy and we went skiing. Finally, this week I was forced to prepare some more templates for class and took drastic action by deleting the pathetic HP Mobile Printing. Now everything works fine. I can’t print directly, but I can save to PDF, which HP Mobile Printing was preventing from EQ5. I redid the templates for the Nosegay and sure enough all of the original templates were fine, except for those two tricky background pieces.

Now the block looks like this:

And here is the detail.

I also finished the basket. I like the way it turned out and was pleasantly surprised when I used the purse conversational with the black background as a background.

Author: Jaye

Quiltmaker who enjoys writing and frozen chocolate covered bananas.