Block 2 - Amethyst - Suffragettes

This time my chosen color scheme works to my advantage as I have lots of purples in my fabric pile.

After some early unease with whether or not I had been able to print the pattern out correctly I set off for my all day Saturday Sewing event thinking I would (a) draft up the pattern myself and (b) let some of the early birds work out the kinks before I started my own block.

I had to leave hurriedly from the sewing event as a big storm was rolling in - indeed a tornado touched down within ten miles (no loss of life or serious damage thank goodness) . At home the lights kept flickering and we had several instances where we lost power for a few seconds so it was into the evening before I made a start on my block. Just as I was trying to upload the photo of the finished block onto the GC flickr site we had more flickering lights and I was afraid we would lose power altogether so shut down without writing this post.

We have no amethyst mining in New Zealand that I am aware of so I posed my block with the lower left corner in the vicinity of Hokitika which is the greenstone/jade capital of New Zealand. I know that's got nothing at all to do with the suffragette movement but with those big pieces of green fabric I thought there was a connection.

This block did have some challenges, the first one being printing out the pdf at the correct size. Everyone was worried about the Y seams but by marking the points and then stopping stitching right at the mark I was able to do the entire block without any reverse sewing! The other challenge was the large size of the pieces; I felt that interesting fabric patterns were called for to fill the space.  I auditioned a few options for the center and here are two:

 As you can see I decided to throw them overboard and they are now floating around offshore. Who knows, they might show up on the beach at some later stage and get used in another block.

There are some lovely blocks showing up on the flickr site and it is good fun to take inspiration from what others have done.

And now I think I just might head out...there's a fabric shop I haven't been to yet in my quest for chartreuse and red-violet fabrics with interest. There's a certain project for someone's birthday I need to source fabric for too. Well, that's my excuse anyway.