Back to Cake - Block 8

It's time for Block 8 of the Layer Cake Quilt Along hosted at Moose on the Porch Quilts.

It took me longer to choose and cut my fabrics than to make the block this time.


As you can see on the pattern printout, there are two layouts for the block shown. I'm sure you could play around and make more, but I decided I would do one of each. For my fat quarter quilt I decided to do Layout 1. In the photo above I was still deciding which of the dot prints I wanted to use. There is a lot of green running through my background print, so I went with the more purple one.

Next was to cut out my background squares from this busy, large, random print. In this photo, if you look at the fabric to the left of the ruler and count by 5 along the grid of my cutting mat, you can see that I would end up with 5 inch squares that looked quite different from each other.


Turning the fabric the other direction, I now end up with 5 inch squares that have larger motifs in them. These squares will be cut in half in the quilt.

The centre of the block will be cut in 4 so I really wanted the original square of fabric to be full of colours and little of the beige background. In the photo above, this is the blue/purple ornament that I thought I wanted in the centre. It would match my other fabric really well.


But then I glanced to my left and saw the other corner of the fabric. Look at all of the little circles! Cutting this square smaller would make it look like another print.

Here is the block completed. Can you see where the smaller motifs ended up?
I'm really glad I took the time to play with my print to see what it could offer me in terms of adding to the design. This has been a challenging fabric line with so many prints and some of the directional stripes, which I avoided in this block!

Here are my planned fabrics for the second Block 8 done with my layer cake of Prayer Flags by April Cornell. I'm planning to do the second layout and use 3 fabrics.

This block will wait until next week as I have a lot of quilting to do!

With Joy,
Sarah Vee

p.s. Please don't use my measurements indicated with my photos to cut your block!! These measurements are the ones I *think* about while cutting, not the actual sizes of the squares. The 5 inch squares I mention are actually *cut* at 4.5. The 4.5 square I label in the photo is actually *cut* at 5, becomes 4.5 inches in the block before it is cut again. Sorry! I don't mean to confuse you, I was just sharing my cutting process for this block:)