Good Monday morning to you!  This week’s Long Time Gone block was a lot trickier than it looked.  Really, how hard could a regular star block and a bunch of straight lined squares and rectangles be?

I cut each plus unit and the star unit to the specified sizes.  Easy.  I really wanted the star to pop, so I made sure the pluses were all colored while the star was black and white.

I started laying out my design and found that it was trickier than I thought.  I really, really had to look at the diagram carefully.  Getting those plus units in the right place took some time and thought.

The pattern said to sew the center of the star nine patch first and then lay out the rest of the pieces, but that made lining up the rest of the blocks a little off and hard to match.

Now on to the easy part, just the row by row sewing.  That was trickier too!  Did I miss a square?  Ugh! I did!  I should have taken that nine patch apart, and started over, but I thought I had it….

Oh well,  I did finally get those plus blocks to line up correctly.  And guess what, I really like them:)!

And the star looked like a beautiful black and white star. Yea!!

But, even looking at these blocks while writing this post, I can see that that darn star block has messed up the plus blocks!

Do you see the pink heart on the top left corner of the star?   The pink should come down into the star to complete the plus.  Really?!   The instructions really didn’t talk about continuing the pluses…. oh well, my seam ripper and I are good friends.  We have a love/hate relationship:)

Ok, I’m back.  That opened Pandora’s Box!  All of those half square triangles had to be changed out and those pesky pluses had to be figured out.  Wow! What a job!  But it is finally done and I like it so so so much better.  The pattern is right now. Whew!

I’m glad I unsewed and fixed it.   It was worth it. Here is a picture with all of my blocks together.  I took the picture before the changes, but you still get the idea.   

Isn’t it great?!   The pattern is from Jen Kingwell’s pattern Long Time Gone.   I am joining along in the quilt along with Gnome Angel.   It is really fun, despite this tricky little block:). Why don’t you join us?

Thank you for dropping by.  I hope you have a totally SWEET day without any “unsewing”.