Swooning Along

Note:  You have one more day to enter the Bowls with Borders giveaway.

I spent Saturday swooning.  No, I wasn't ill - haha!  I was making Swoon blocks.  They are really not difficult, but they are a little tricky.  It's easy to mess up if you're not paying attention.

You know how with some block patterns once you "get it" you can just whiz along and put the pieces together and make perfect blocks?  I can't do that with Swoon.  I need to keep the instructions right there where I can see them.  I pin them up on my spool rack (a straight pin in a spool of serger thread makes a great bulletin board!) right above the sewing machine and look at them for every step.

The swoon pattern is all rectangles, squares, HSTs and Flying Geese, so the components aren't hard.  But somehow getting them in the right order baffles me.  I have found that once I finish all the HSTs and Flying Geese, if I lay them out in stacks and in sewing order next to the sewing machine it's easier to put them together correctly.  The 4 corners of the swoon pattern are all the same, so I stack them up and sew them assembly-line style.

Here are all those pieces in the above photo stitched together.  But one thing that blew my mind is that it is upside down for the next step.  I put several together wrong and had to take them apart.  Yes, my seam ripper is my {best} friend.  =P

It only takes a moment to flip the stack around so that it is "right side up", but boy did it help me.

Four blocks down.  Eight to go.  I'm swooning along.