ABC Wednesday K

There are several quilt blocks which come from Kansas or Kentucky, and some with a biblical reference such as King's  Cross, but today I  challenged  myself  to do this one,  which  is  called    Key West Beauty.

At first I thought this was going to be fairly simple to cut, and fairly straightforward to put together. There are no inside seams to place, and I thought the angles in the center were all 45º. But the green and the blue meeting in the center are different angles. I printed the block out and used a method called paper piecing to do it. With paper piecing, you place the fabrics one at a time in sequence and stitch on the printed lines of the paper to get the seams exactly right. I did it in four sections like that, then put the four together.

Have you ever seen the same pattern with different colors in different parts and not realized it was the same? Different values--intensity of color or lightness to darkness--in different places can make a block look very different with different parts coming into dominance. Check it out in this comparison sketch of the Key West Beauty in two different sets of fabrics.

Find ABC Wednesday here.

ABC J

Visit Wikipedia for a quick bit of info about the plant Jack in the Pulpit. Do you think that the quilt block by that name suggests the plant? I have not yet made my sample of the Jack in the Pulpit block, having been gone out of town for five of the last seven days, so you will have to settle for the sketch. I will play catch up next week.

ABC Wednesday is here.