Scraps Are Fabric, Too

Some quilters throw their scraps in the trash, but since I am a child of refugees who had some very lean times in their lives, I have a lot of trouble wasting perfectly good fabric. Today, my habit of saving scraps came in handy for this next block, "B-13 Four Corner Press", a beginner-level block that I chose to paper piece, but it could easily be done using rotary cutting. The dark blue pieces with the watermelon seed-shaped spots you see on the right of the above photo were just what I needed for the 4 corners of this block. The strip was just barely wide enough, but it worked.

When I first saw the photo of Jane Stickle's block, I thought she had somehow managed to cut the diamonds out from the center dark piece and applique that onto a piece of the lighter striped fabric which she also used for the long side pieces. At that point I was almost ready to give up on my idea of making this quilt...I figured it would take me weeks just to make this one block.


However, when I read Brenda Papadakis' book, she said that the large center piece of fabric in this block is a "cheater cloth" made to look like 2 different fabrics. So I found a fabric with diamonds on it (sort of) and used it to whip this block up in no time... I believe this is one of the few blocks in the original quilt that uses more than 2 fabrics.


I think I'm up to 35 blocks now...