Week 3 of the Civil War blocks

This block for the Barbara Brackman Civil War block of the week gave me angst. While I plodded on with it I was thinking of a variety of words I could use for the title of this posting. Would it be "on a dark night, without my glasses" or "phew, done" or "I won't let it beat me" or "and now for the practice block".

But now it is done, I just want to post it and put it away.

My first angst area was in choosing the fabrics. Only two needed you say? Yes, but with my chosen color scheme of blue and grey and this being a Confederate block I couldn't do it in blue totally. Friends who are not doing this BOW "helped" me by researching the flag. And we found the Bonnie Blue and all suceeding flags had white stars on a blue ground. In trying to fit this with what I have already done we decided that I could reverse my previous blocks and use the very pale grey fabric that had been used as the background for the foreground, or stars, this time. Then I took a blue, white and grey stripe as the background thus making more or less, white stars on a blue ground.

Then there was the layout angst. Should all the stars stand up straight on two legs? They don't in the picture given on BB's blog. In the flags they don't stand exactly straight but they are very regular in how they stand. I cut my stars out and laid them on the background wanting them to stand straight. But when I achieved that I discovered points of adjacent stars might touch or, worse, they might end up in the seam allowance. So topsy turvy any which way is how they ended up.

And finally the stitching angst. My eyes would be concentrating so hard on laying that stitch tight to the edge that I would sometimes forget to change the length of the in bite. Oh dear.

But finally I got all seven stitched down and cut the thread and decided "done" was as good as this block is going to get.


Here it is, the Seven Sisters block.