Black Flower Boxes

Remember my Flower Boxes tutorial?  I planned the size of the blocks to use up the fabric I had available, without thinking about how they would fit together as a whole, and it bothered me that the corners for the flowers didn’t line up.

So…  I grabbed some more fabric from my stash, and set to work adjusting the size of the corner block and strips to make the corners match.  This is part of what I like best about quilting.  The artistic outlet and the cathartic work are nice too.  But I like the math.  I like figuring out how to make the finished product bigger or smaller.  I don’t really like patterns.  I would rather look at a photo, draw on graph paper, and come up with workable measurements on my own.

I wanted to stick with cutting 2 inch wide strips, which would make 1½ inch finished strips.  I also wanted to stick with 4 strips added to two sides of the corner block, because I liked the basic look of the original Flower Boxes.

4 strips X 1½” = 6 inches.  That means the corner square also needs to be 6 inches, and then everything will line up nicely in a 12” block.

Quilts use a ¼ inch of fabric in the seam allowance, from each side that is sewn, so a square that is 2 ½ inches on a side, will be 2 inches once all 4 sides are sewn. Likewise, a 12” finished block will measure 12½ inches before the blocks are sewn together.  That’s why the strips are cut at 2” wide, but the math for figuring the size of the corner block uses 1½”.

Here is a nice little chart (not to scale) to show finished block dimensions.  Remember to add ½ to all measurements (length and width) for cutting.

In the first Flower Boxes tutorial, I loved how the colors played together, but was unhappy with the lay out of the blocks.

In this Flower Boxes quilt, the corners all line up nicely, which is the look I was going for, but I’m not crazy about the color combination.  I guess a third flower boxes quilt is in order.   Practice makes perfect!