The Accidental Block

B&W of the Accidental Block

I was intrigued with some of the quilts made using the XBlocks Quilting Ruler. (They call it a rotary cutting tool).  The above block is made with a light purple batik on a white background.  I desatured to experiment using different colors.

I call it the "Accidential Block" as I was playing around with a Baby Basix which uses 1.5 " strips (v. 2.5" strips for the larger patterns).  I had nothing particularly in mind other than to conquer my spatially inhibited brain in using the ruler.

You see, the ruler has a ruler up and a ruler down position...and if you turn your fabric upside down, as I did in my experimentation, but not pictured here), you get some differences again.

The above block is a 16 patch...4 groupings of 4 blocks.   The first quad (right) is ruler up (I call this right side) and the second quad (left) is ruler down (I call this wrong side).  The flipping of the ruler gives you mirror images.  When you put an adjacent block together, you get a horizontal diamond, v. the vertical shown here. A gaggle of these blocks looks quite nice.  I made 4 of these blocks (no small feat on my end).  I will piece them into the back of a quilt that I'm making for my step mother.

Yes, the back of the block is a 'mess of' seams.  Yes, cutting these small blocks is time consuming, but I am so happy with the end result.  One could do a lot creative "stuff".  When making this block, I had to resort to a schematic to make sure that I organized the right/wrong side of the ruler blocks as well as the strips (light, dark, light; dark, light, dark). 

That I flipped fabric over was another thing entirely...but it was my way of flipping things over in real time,  v. trying to conceptualize it in my head...something that makes my head hurt.

I will definitely experiment with this block in both layouts and color ways.