Breaking the Log Jam

If I'm honest, I have to say I am well tired of this Austen Family Album Quilt project. If you have been following this blog, you will know that I have had my difficulties here and there with patchwork techniques I'd not been familiar with and with color choice and placement. I had finally managed to get to block #27 King's Crown for George III. There were difficulties with the measurements given on the blog, which our erstwhile blogger, Barbara Brackman did correct in a day or so. I had of course attempted the cut before I saw the correction, so had to re cut one piece. If you look at the examples in her blog, you will see that in my version I added another jewel to the crown.  As always if you are interested in finding out how the reign of George III affected the life and times of the Austens, please look here.


Next came Crossroads which tells the tale of Jane's acceptance at age 27 of a proposal of marriage from a 21 year-old Harris Bigg-Whither and what happened next. This blog entry describes much of the difficulty of finding a mate in this time in history.

This block as you can see involves the motif known as "Flying Geese." I've always liked the look if them but had never tried them. After getting this block cut I started the construction. That's when the log jam occurred. I sewed the triangles together in 12 little birds and then sewed one set of three together. Major Jam. It was quite uneven and crooked. I hated it and it sat in the sewing room for at least three weeks. More likely, a month. I kept thinking, if only this had been a paper piecing pattern. I knew I could have rocked it. Last week I gave drafting a paper pattern a try, but I already had the pieces cut. Theoretically I should have been able to make it work.

Today, after letting my brain work on the problem for quite a while I decided to mark where the seams should be after carefully measuring. It's not perfect, none of my blocks are, but I think it's a decent effort.

So, two more blocks down and there should be eight more to go. As my math is notoriously bad, I will consider this a good estimate and soldier on. Almost there really, considering where I've been. I have the next block cut and ready to sew. I have seen the blocks up to and including the one in yesterday's post (#36). Lots of triangles, the mention of an inset seam which I think is likely the dreaded Y-seam, renamed to sound less ominous. So a bit to go, but I must finish now that I've gotten this far, I think.

Austen Family Album Update

Yesterday, as I discussed in a previous post here, another quilt block in the Austen Family Album "quilt-along " was introduced. This was number three and honors Jane Austen's father, the Reverend George Austen. It's called "Cross Within Cross". You can check it out on this blog.

So, how am I doing? You may well ask. I realized last week when I needed to finish up the first block before starting on figuring out the second, that I could easily and quite quickly fall very far behind!

The first block, "Bright Star for Jane Austen," which I paper pieced, turned out like this:















                                                      The second block was "Sister's Choice for Cassandra E. Austen." I needed to piece it conventionally as I said in last week's blog. Here is a photo of the the un-trimmed block. I finished it this morning. Once I committed to conventional piecing, the color/fabric choices and placement took longer than I imagined.  The center and the dark half squares are a Japanese cotton fabric called kasuri, that my friend Julie blogged about a couple weeks ago in this entry. This piece came from a recycled yukata. I still need to "square up" but am happy that the piecing is completed.

Onward to the Rev. George!