Construction Zone

I practically need to wear a hard hat for all the construction I've been doing over here.

I've finished making all the units required for the Saltbox quilt I wrote about in a previous post.  All together I needed 8 houses, 6 trees and 12 Sawtooth stars.  The first few stars went together with no problem, but then I tried making 3 at once, and instead of stars, I ended up with square-in-a-square blocks:

You can probably tell by the quality of the photo, that it was taken at night. ( Note to self: don't quilt when you should be getting ready for bed!)

I re-made the faulty flying geese units in the correct colors this time, and in the end I had these:

I purposely put off making the last one in case I needed a certain color combo in the finished layout.

One thing I learned about Sawtooth Stars is that sewing two or more stars together is a real challenge to get them to lie flat.  There are so many intersections with multiple seam allowances.  Here is an example of just some of the areas where the seam allowances piled up.

I found that what worked best for me was to use a wool pressing mat, which retains the heat, and then laying a heavy book on top of the freshly ironed block to allow it to set a bit while it cooled.

I was pretty satisfied with the result.  Those blocks laid FLAT!

After finishing all the individual units, I settled on a layout, trying to evenly distribute the lights and darks,  the various colors, and the busy backgrounds.  Oh I can't count how many times I switched blocks, stood back to look at it and then decided something else had to be changed. 

At last, I had all the horizontal rows sewn together:

I'm a little undecided if I want to sew all the vertical rows together, or if I want to put a sashing between each row as a separator:

I think the sashing between the rows would make it a little less chaotic and a little more like streets.  I plan on living with it on the design board for a few days before I decide.

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