Maple Leaves Fall in Texas

Hi everybody, Jaggie here! Boy last month was very stressful for me. As you remember, I reported a couple of weeks ago that Veronica was trying to get some UFO's completed. She's been really busy chugging along to get some of them completed. Then last month she found 21 Maple Leaf blocks, I thought that sounded pretty tasty, but she informed be I was not to "taste" them. She did give me a real pretty blue one all for myself.
 

 

We both looked at them and studied them, she said they were from an exchange 20 years ago. That's a really long time, I wasn't around then. She said she never put them together because she wasn't sure what to do with them. I looked at the blocks she made and they were kinda' ugly. She agreed.
 

We took pictures of her 2 blocks and then some of the others. We pondered them and talked about what to do with them. She said she wished her freinds had stopped her and told her that her blocks were not the correct fabric, I think they were supposed to be leafy or with little flowers. She had some wild stuff she used. (See what I mean! Uh-Uh-Glee!! Even the camera didn't want to see them!)
 

 

 

Her blocks were wonky, that's the polite way of saying that they were not the correct size. After a while she started cutting strips of fabric and sewing around 2 sides. She had a great pattern from a magazine. She worked on 5 blocks a day and had the top done in 4 days. Some of the other blocks needed a little "tweaking" as well. She was sweating bullets over these blocks, that's why I was stressed. I kept thinking she was gonna grab my pretty blue block and put it in with the others, but I still have it. The top turned out really nice. Then on the next Monday we saw our friend Susan Cleveland. She has a great new tool, that Veronica wished she'd had when she made these blocks.
 

Veronica says that she wished that her friends had stopped her when she made the "wonky" blocks and explained to her the correct way to piece half square triangles, how to square them up instead of forcing them to fit, how she probaly should have pressed and measured them to make sure they were up to "snuff", then putting the individual squares together to make the blocks. She says she probably would have had this top together and we could be snuggling under it by now. So for all you seasoned quilters out there, take a few minutes to mentor beginners and get them off on the right foot. They'll thank you and you'll have a friend for life. And snuggly quilts instead of UFO's.

 

These are the other blocks she has ... a little more manageable! Stay tuned for a photo of the completed quilt.