Dear Baby Jane: RS-11

Block number/name: RS-11 “Hills of Jerusalem”

Date completed: September 1, 2008

Number of pieces: 31

Notes on block: Triangles are intimidating. At first, it’s because they just look like they all have a scary number of pieces. But I get over that pretty quickly as really, they don't have any more than the little square blocks, and they're bigger to boot. The real killers are the angles—bias edges everywhere. And then the long skinny strips on the sides...it seems like a lot of the triangles have those. I really dislike piecing skinny strips. The keys for me seem to be very careful handling of the pieces and starch.

This triangle is far from perfect. It takes a little bit of manhandling to get it to line up exactly with the ruler, but it is the right size and should work out once in the quilt.

Did I mention how I really dislike those skinny side strips? Ugh.

It took me about 3.5 hours to do this one. I started at 10 pm last night with SpikeTV (we really need to get a remote so I can change the channel on the upstairs tv). First up was the cheez-tacular B-movie Depth Charge. Next was an episode of CSI, followed by a snippet of Star Trek: Voyager. I stayed up way too late.