Sweet Strawberry Quilt Along: Week 3
It’s our favorite week of the Sweet Strawberry QAL: putting the quilt top together! To start on this week, you will need to have followed the pattern in the Piece & Love Book through step 3. Continuing on from there, we will start by finishing the half Hourglass blocks. Each of the half blocks needs to have a background triangle sewn on to complete the other side of the block. Since the background triangles are slightly smaller, you need to match the centers of the triangles as shown in the video below.
Once all the half blocks are completed with a background triangle, you can square them up. Complete the leaf section of the quilt by sewing the blocks together and adding the other background pieces. Follow steps 4 and 5 in the book for more detailed instructions.
Lookin’ good! Next up, we’ll finish up the strawberry section. The half blocks in the strawberry need to be finished, but some of them are done differently than others, so it’s important to read the pattern carefully. Four of them are finished the same way as the leaf blocks, and then four of them need to be trimmed and sewn into a bigger block. This is explained further in steps 4 and 6 of the book.
Once you’re through step 6, it’s time to add the cute little black seeds to the strawberry blocks (step 7). Here’s our favorite tip for pressing stitch and flip squares: press the flip before you trim the seam allowance. It keeps things so much more square. Here’s a video to show you what we mean:
The next step after adding all the seed corners is to sew the strawberry section together. For the top of the strawberry, you’ll do rows, then sew the rows together and add the background pieces. This is step 8 in the book.
For the bottom section of the strawberry, you will make large triangle blocks just like in the Piece & Joy QAL. Add the background pieces, and then you’ll have all of the sections of the quilt ready to sew together. Complete through step 10 to get to this point.
Once all of the sections of the quilt are sewn together, you will have yourself a finished quilt top. Give everything a good pressing, and that’s where we will stop for this week in the quilt along. You will have completed all of the steps in the book up to the section titled “Finishing the Quilt”.
With the quilt top pieced, you’re done with week three! Next week, we will finish the quilt by quilting and binding. Until then, you can share your progress in a couple of different ways:
- On Instagram, use both #sweetstrawberryqal and #theclothparcel hashtags in your post. You can also tag us @theclothparcel.
- In our private Facebook group, you can share photos in a post or in the comments of any of our posts. We are seeing some really fun quilts pop up in the Facebook group! You can also ask for help or advice there.
See you next week when we finish up this cutie!
