December block - Diamonds

 Welcome back to our modern BOM!

Hopefully you can take a bit of time to get this sewn up before you get too busy for the holidays.

Here is our block for December...

This block gives a nice opportunity to fussy-cut a piece of fabric for the centre of the block. I almost succeeded in my attempt!

This month we are paper-piecing again....I think it may be the last time for this programme.

Here's a few tips in how I constructed my block...

For the centre section, "A", I cut a square 4 3/4" (my orange fabric). For the background I used 2 squares cut at 5.5", then cut them on the diagonal to give you the 4 triangles needed. 

For the half-square triangles, I did as the instructions read...but you can do them in your preferred method, as long as they end up at 3.5" unfinished. 

What I did do differently...I pressed 2 of the HSTs to my purple colour, and pressed the other 2 to the background fabric. By doing this it helped when sewing them to each other to form the Flying Geese segments.

...I chose to press seam of the Flying Geese open to help it lie flatter.

Now on to Segments B, C, D, & E

I chose to mark my colour choices on my pattern pieces to help keep me straight...

Segments B  & C

(For my white background for these segments, and for Segments D & E...I cut a 3" width-of-fabric strip. It did all four segments with more than 12" left. )

On your instruction sheet, the pieces that are yellow...I cut a 5.5" square and cut it in half diagonally for the 2 segments. This was enough with just a little wiggle room. If you are not a confident paper-piecer, maybe go a bit larger to give yourself a bit of a safety net.

The pieces that are orange on the instruction sheet...I cut a 4 1/4" square and cut it diagonally to get the 2 pieces needed. Again, cut this a bit bigger if it makes you more comfortable. 

Segments D & E

Same as above except with the following measurements...

The orange in the instructions, maybe 5" cut in half diagonally ( I say maybe because in mine I had cut some rectangles that created too much waste. That's when I figured that triangles would have worked more efficiently.)

For the yellow bits...cut a 3.5" square and cut it on the diagonal to get 2 triangles.

Normally with a paper-pieced block you would leave the paper intact until the whole block is constructed. The sections in this particular block are so big and simply-pieced that I decided to remove the paper before putting all the segments together. 

 

(At this point, I chose to take one of the two pieces on the left, either Segment B or C, and I reversed the pressing on one of the seams that fall between my background and blue fabric. This made the seams nestle nicely when sewing B & C together.)

Now sew together like so (and I chose to press these seams open)...

Then sew the final two seams, which I also pressed open as I thought it made the spots where my blue fabrics meet much nicer...well, 3 out of 4 of them, anyways!

And here are our first four, playing nicely on the design wall...

(What a dull, dreary picture!...that's the best I can do on this dull, dreary day.)

You can find the PDF for this month's block HERE .

I hope you have fun with this block. If there are any questions, please ask me or one of your quilty friends for some help.

And remember to post a picture of your block on Instagram with the hashtag #tqgmodernbom so we can all see your beautiful blocks. Maybe this month try to post a picture of your block, and a picture of all four blocks we've done so far.