Octadot QAL Part 2: Sewing

Yes! This week we start sewing. Are you ready?

This week we will sew half of our blocks. If you are making the mini quilt you will sew 10 blocks. If you make the Octadot quilt you will sew 40 blocks.

Previous blog posts in the Octadot QAL

Part 1: Farbic Pull

Snowballing

Snowballing is where smaller squares are sewn on the corners of a larger square, trimmed and pressed to create a “snowball” corner.

That is what we are going to do with all of our squares.

When we assemble the quilt we will put the blocks on point, but let’s not worry about that yet.

Start Sewing

Take one 5” x 5” square and four 1¾” x 1¾” background squares.

Place one small square on each of four corners.

Sew diagonally from corner to corner across each small square and trim the corners.

Press open, and there is your first block for the quilt!

Half blocks and Quarter blocks

Since all the blocks will be put on point, the edge of the quilt will consist of half blocks and quarter blocks.

Here is an illustration to give you an idea of what that means.

For the mini Octadot quilt you will need:

12 whole blocks (the blue ones)
12 half blocks (the yellow ones)

You could just make 20 in total and cut some of then in half. (Making 18 blocks would be enough, but I like a little more variation in the squares, so I made a few extra.)

For the bigger Octadot quilt you will also need quarter blocks.

For this quilt you will need:

65 whole blocks (blue)
23 half blocks (yellow)
2 quarter blocks (green)

Cutting the half and quarter blocks

After snowballing a square, you can cut the block in half diagonally for the edge blocks. As you can see in the image below, you could even cut 1 half block and 2 quarter blocks from one whole block.