Hey Everyone, welcome back to Stitch Along Sunday.

So last Sunday was the first Sunday in June and I should have had this post out for then but I had to make it far more complicated than it really was and I took all week to create this 14″ x 13″ piece. I just kept fiddling with and rearranging the squares. And the laugh is on me because the piece did not end up how I had it when I started sewing everything together.

The rules for Week 1 can be found at Rules Week 1 on Ruth’s blog. They were really quite simple – create a piece by piecing together either squares, triangles or strips and pick a background fabric to go with the pieced fabrics. Ruth used strips for her piece and you can see her piece at June Stitch Along Week 1. Also don’t forget to check out the June Stitch Along Gallery to see what everyone else is up to with their challenge piece.

First of all I picked my fabrics – five gradating fabrics from light to dark for the squares in peach/orange and a background fabric in blue. These two colours are one of my favourite complementary colour schemes.

Fabrics for squares and background

Next I cut up several squares from each fabric in 4 different sizes – 3″, 2 ½″, 2″ and 1 ½″.

Then I started to arrange the squares and rearrange and rearrange some more and then rearrange even more. In the end I dropped the 2″ squares from the equation as well as the lightest fabric. I decided I only needed 3 sizes of squares and the light ones were just a bit too yellow and didn’t fit in with the other fabrics.

Light fabric just not fitting in

Finally I started sewing them together and soon discovered that the 1 ½″ squares needed to be 1 ¾″ in order to fit together with the 3″ squares. Yes, they fit very nicely side by side when not sewn but then I had forgot about the seam allowance. Silly me. I recut the small squares and continued sewing.

One arrangement of squares

All in all I made 6 rows and put them all together – the rows of 2 ½″ squares ended up being shorter than the rows of 3″ squares but since I am pretty sure that I will be cutting this up I was not concerned and just happy that I finally had week 1 completed.

How the squares ended up

I had actually thought I would do 3 of these little pieces – one with the squares, one with the triangles and one with the strips but then I came to my senses and decided to do just one.

Onward to week 2 now – hopefully I can complete it just a little bit faster than week 1.

Happy Quilting!