UFO Finished

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Child sized quilt in Snail's Trail blocks

I've been going through some fabrics to get more organized and I'm finding a lot of Unfinished Opportunities (UFOs.) This was a stack of 24 Snail's Trail blocks that were left over from a twin sized quilt I created back in the early 2000's.

It has been a while since I've done precision machine sewing. My latest projects have either been improvisational, meaning that the block units have no perceived pattern and are cut after they're sewn together to square them up, or they are appliquéd, so I can manipulate the fabric at my fingertips. I'd gotten rusty at finessing the seam allowances to make everything fit together.  

Four of the squares were smaller than the rest. They were saved for the backing: a modern setting for a traditional block: 


The fabrics in this quilt were either water themed or they had motion to enhance the motion of the block. It seemed appropriate then to machine quilt this one in various shades of blue curly-q's:

Quilting detail

It was interesting to flip these blocks over to the wrong side and see the workmanship of my earlier self. Not bad. But, I can see why I put the blocks aside after finishing the twin size below. This is a fairly challenging pattern to sew and maybe harder to get your head around how it should all come together. 
Sometimes it's helpful to go back to those early projects and appreciate how much has been learned, . . .  and how far we've come! 

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