Snowman Blocks and Scrappy Sign Up

From the comments you have left, it seems I'm not the only one who decided to do the snowmen row (photo below) different from the original Quilt Doodle directions.  And you know there's nothing wrong with doing them the way Cindy has written them--she wanted to base everything on 2-1/2" squares and that's the way she wrote the instructions, but in quilting, there are usually several ways to achieve the same results.  After all, look at how many ways we have to make flying geese blocks!

Well, as I mentioned the other day, I decided to make mine the way I've learned in the past.  And Janet, one of my readers, asked me what measurements I used to make my blocks, so I thought I'd go ahead and post what I did in case there are other readers who want to try doing them this way.

First I cut 6-1/2" white squares--there are seven heads in the row of snowmen so I cut seven squares.  And for each "head," I needed four corners, so I cut 28 2-1/2" squares from the blue fabric.

These blocks are often referred to as snowball blocks, which seems particularly appropriate for snowman heads, right?  To make the heads or snowballs, you'll position one 2-1/2" square on each corner of the 6-1/2" white square and attach the smaller squares by sewing on the diagonal of those 2-1/2" squares.  There's a nice illustrated tutorial on Craftsy you can see HERE that shows how to sew these on and trim the corners off.  (And when I made mine, I sewed a second seam about 1/4" closer to the corners and then trimmed between the two stitch lines, so I ended up with small half square triangles from the "waste" corners.  I'm currently working on another project using those little "leftovers" that I should be ready to show you tomorrow.)

After I made the snowball blocks, I attached a 6-1/2" x 2-1/2" rectangle to the top and bottom of the blocks.  I needed to cut 14 of those pieces from the blue fabric.  Finally, I cut eight rectangles from the blue fabric that measured 10-1/2" x 2-1/2"--and those became the sashing between the blocks when I sewed the entire row together.  Simple enough?  If anything's not clear, please ask.

Now, on another subject, who's working on a scrappy project this weekend?  If you have something scrappy you'd like to share with us, please add your blog link to Mister Linky below and we'll come over and visit:



I hope you're enjoying your weekend as much as I'm enjoying mine! I'm feeling much recovered from the stomach bug I had last week, but I decided I would take it easy this weekend just to make sure. Of course, it's no burden to spend the weekend in the Sweat Shop, right? It's been awhile since I had a free weekend to devote to sewing so I'm having a great time! Happy stitching!