Radiant Jewel {Diamond Blocks}

While I showed a little peak of my Radiant Jewel quilt beginnings in my retreat post, I didn't share a lot about my plans for this quilt.

The quilt has two main blocks -- the diamond blocks that I started on retreat and star blocks. While on retreat I was able to finish 11 of the 17 diamond blocks needed for the quilt and I started the HSTs and flying geese for blocks #12 and #13.

This weekend was the first time working on this project since retreat and I quickly finished the last of the diamond blocks.

I'm very happy with my blocks and as you might be able to tell in this picture, I picked the largest scale prints for the diamond blocks. This quilt is all based around working from one jelly roll and one charm pack so all of the flying geese and HSTs for the diamond units are made with the stitch-and-flip method. If I were to make this quilt again, I wouldn't make these blocks using this method and would find a more fabric efficient way to make the blocks.

However, I did decide to ignore the directions to make the flying geese for the star blocks using the solid fabrics since I had continuous yardages of these fabrics instead of precuts. I have 72 all-solid flying geese to make for my 18 star blocks -- I'll have 6 stars in each of the three jewel tones.

My original hope was that I would be able to have enough leftover fabric from the quilt to make extra blocks to enlarge the quilt. However, when the kit and directions say to "cut carefully, there's almost no extra!" that's probably not a possibility! Part of this is how inefficient some of the cutting is -- one of the next steps is cutting down some of my 2.5" strips into 1.5" strips to make smaller four patches -- that much waste is a killer! Add that in with all of the stitch and flip units, and my heart aches.

Happy Monday -- I hope you get to do some sewing today!

Sharing at Linky Tuesday and Let's Bee Social!