Dear Jane - Hunter's Moon (A-3)

To me the easiest part of making this block was saying I was going to make it! I learned a lot - first off - I have never appliqued before and I did find it challenging. I cut out my little melon shapes from the fabric and then my next thought was oh! now what do I do??

I ended up not using these at all!

I decided that it would be easier to use the back-basting method. So, I put those little shapes aside and I proceeded to tracing the melon shapes on the wrong side of the background fabric and then realized that I had them oriented incorrectly.

Look closely-you can see the incorrect markings.

I needed to place them in the correct position so I folded the freezer-paper pattern into quarters and cut along the marked line to make my 1/4 circle template. I aligned that onto my fabric that I had folded into quarters and traced along the edge of the paper. I did this to all four inner corners of the folded fabric square. That gave me the circular alignment markings to place the melon shapes for tracing.

I placed a rectangle of fabric on the front of the main fabric, back-basted and trimmed it a bit and then proceeded to stitching it. I got a little over-confident and trimmed the points too close and my first melon ended up not being long enough and I didn't realize it until I added the second melon. I definitely had to do the first one again because the tip was shredded!

I had to remove one of these melons!

It was very slow going for me to make this block and it definitely did not finish perfectly but I did my best and I will leave it as it is. To me, my Dear Jane journey is about having a beautiful completed quilt and it is also about learning new skills and techniques. I hope that my applique skills improve and that one day I will be able to say confidently that, yes, I can applique. I have seen so many gorgeous applique pieces that I would love to make one day but....I do have to start at the beginning.