Celebrating International co-operation and treasuring our Beautiful Earth - 12" block

The theme for the Quilt Block Mania 12 inch block for June is “International”, and what better way, in these difficult times, to celebrate the way we humans can achieve amazing things when we collaborate and co-operate. From the Space Station we can see our beautiful world and its beauty and fragility in the immensity of space. All the things we face from COVID to climate change to conflict are dwarfed, and our world seems so precious and so beautiful.

My quilt block is pieced and mostly rectangles with one curve. I’m really pleased with how the space station came out. With the earth, and just for fun, I added Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, because that’s my place. I used a hand dye for the ocean and cut it so the paler area is towards Antarctica. I was just going to have the beautiful blue Pacific Ocean, but I got carried away.

The piecing is relatively straightforward. I think the key is to lay out the pieces so you can see where they go because there are quite a few different sized small pieces. I sewed the space station first. The vanes of the space station are just ‘snowballed’, i.e. I sewed a black square onto each corner of the vane across the diagonal so when the square was folded back it formed a triangle. The excess can then be cut off to avoid bulk.

For the centre section, I made the bits that stick out the front into strips of black-silver-black, and black-grey black. then I just had 5 strips to sew together to make the centre section. It went together quickly. Once the space station was sewn, I added the corner and side triangles.

For the earth, I pieced the curve of the earth to the outer space section. I cut these with templates. It’s quite a large curve and so it was ok to sew matching and pinning the centre of each piece and the ends. It then sewed smoothly keeping the quarter inch seam accurate and the raw edges together. I pressed to the earth to save clipping the seam.

To get the countries, I looked up a satellite image of the earth to get the country shapes slightly distorted for the curvature of the earth. Then I made a rough but recognisable (I hope) sketch in reverse on the paper side of fusible web. I positioned the countries roughly in place and ironed on. I haven’t put the countries in the pattern because I think that’s a bit of personalising that you can do for your own fabulous piece of paradise. I had planned it to be just blue, like flying over the Pacific which stretches endlessly on and you get excited if you see a tiny island. I’ve only flown over it once, but what a beautiful sight.

I hope you enjoy making my pattern, celebrating our world and our hope for the future. We humans can cooperate and collaborate, and act in whatever small ways we can to make the world a better place.

Have a look at the awesome blocks from the other designers, and don’t forget to leave a comment, it really makes a difference. It’s so nice to know people appreciate the hard work that goes into designing and sharing these blocks.

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12 inch blocks, quiltmania bloghopSusan Griffiths12 inch block, international, space, outer space, quilt block mania, quilt block mania bloghop, international space station6 Comments