The last few days I was happily sewing along on my English paper piecing project (see last post). Finally I had all six parts and laid them out for joining into the final block.

And I realized that I don’t like it. It’s too dull, not yellow enough. I tried to persuade myself to finish the block telling myself that no one will notice in the final quilt. But I’m kind of a perfectionist (especially when I put a lot of work into it) so I removed the paper templates and started the block with other fabrics.

I like it a lot better now! Although the picture doesn’t really show it is a lot more yellow now.

The low contrast in the piece is exactely what I want to achieve. At a first glance you should only see a yellow block and only if you look closer you should realize that there is a pattern.

On the positive side – I secured the end of the stichting lines with locking backstitches as Katja Marek suggests. But I wasn’t too sure if they work. I tried to unsew some stitches on a discarded piece and now I know that those backstitches are really secure.

I will keep track of the sewing time for this project – the first discarded block took me 3 hours.