We blame Mrs. Pickles

Last week, we made the rounds of the Needle and Thread Network (as usual) to check on all the other Canadian crafters and we were really excited to see what Mrs. Pickles was up to. She's working on a block called Whirlygiggle. Now, if the name didn't grab you, the block would. Simple but there's movement about it. It just struck our fancy.

our Whirlygiggle Block - 9 inches square - ready to stitch

We decided we'd like to try it, too. We don't know how Mrs. Pickles put hers together but we thought we'd like to try to strip piece the fabric first because we're just in the mood to zoom right along. No fussy piecing for us today.

We want to make a baby quilt. Twelve 9 inch blocks with some borders. We like scrappy and we want it to be a little bit ... different. Not traditional colours. And it needs to be unisex. So ... off we went! In true CoCo fashion, we just dove right in!

First, we drew out the block (or our version of the block with apologies to Mrs. Pickles).

We put our 6 x 12 inch ruler on the drawing and put a piece of masking tape along the slanted seam line. We put another piece of masking tape to mark the bottom left corner of our 5 inch square. (This leaves us 1/4 inch seam allowances to end up with the 4 1/2 inch components ... 4 of them made the block.)

Next....what size strips will we need?  We measured and found a pair of 3 1/2 inch wide strips, 24 inches long will make the 4 components of one block.

We laid the ruler over the strip pieced set and cut up the right edge of the patch and across the top.

Then we turned everything upside down and aligned the ruler so that the 90 degree corner lined up with the previously cut corner and we finished cutting out the 5 inch squares. We cut 3 more the same way and stitched the 4-patch together. That's it. They went together really fast and they're accurate!

Thanks, Mrs. Pickles, for the inspiration!

~ Happy W.I.P. Wednesday, everybody!