In all my years of quilting I’ve never had to sew a Y-seam! Well this assembly is going to require a combination of diamond overlap joins and Y-seams.

I did a bit of research to find out how to put this collection of diamonds together. The objective is to assemble the various hexagons where they occur (the cubes) using a Y-seam to add the third element; then joining diamonds in the usual way with the 1/4″ overlap. 

This is what I’ve managed to assemble so far. I started with the cube with the yellow dots, then added the two edge triangles, next the pair of diamonds on the left, followed by the pair of diamonds with corner triangle that creates the left corner (half the triangle will be trimmed away when the sewing is finished), and finally adding the trio of diamonds immediately above with a Y-seam.

No doubt about it – it is finicky work – I’m assuming as I do more I’ll get better, and the sewing will go faster. The trick is marking the 1/4″ seam allowance join positions before sewing so you can run a pin through the dots to secure the overlap, then stitching “from dot to dot” as various people have suggested I do. 

My 1/4″ eye is actually pretty good – I have marked some of the “dot” positions in what I’ve assembled so far, but I think I can do reasonably well by aligning a pin in the precise location I want to start sewing and finish sewing – I’ll see as I go along. The difficulty with marking dots on each diamond is that I don’t have a 60° diamond template with small holes in the corner start/stop seam allowance positions so I’m having to improvise using a ruler which is very cumbersome and time consuming.

I did print out a copy of the layout to work from – makes it much easier to keep track of where I’ve picked up blocks, how to align them, and then put them back where they belong.

This assembly is going to take a number of days because there are a lot of diamonds to put together but I’m underway.

Oh, and BTW, I cut 76 diamonds from the leftover 5 1/4″ strips (along with 45 triangles), colour sorted each pile, and put both aside. I try working on just one project at a time so I can actually finish it.

I’ve collected Kaffe Fassett fabrics over the years, made several quilts using them, but still had more than enough fabric remaining in my stash to use for many other projects.

Recently I bought three KF Collective fat quarter sets from Hyggeligt Fabrics in St. Mary’s ON to add to my collection. A month or so ago I also purchased a few more 1/2m pieces and another fat quarter bundle from Heidi Wulfraat’s woolworks studio in Mahone Bay (she carries the complete Free Spirit collection with quite a few out of print fabrics).

I spent most of yesterday pressing, then cutting a 5 1/4″ strip from each of the 98 KF fabrics I now have – the strip is long enough for at least 2 diamonds and a triangle.

Today, I cut out a single diamond from each fabric and began laying them out. I could have just placed diamonds in a row and then filled in below that row, but I decided to start with a “star” and work from the centre out. To begin with I had just a single 6-diamond star in the centre, but as the layout grew, I decided to add another star above and below the original star.

Then I filled in the remaining space.

Stars / Tumbling Blocks

The fabrics fell into several categories: there were “leaf ombre” and “solid” diamonds; there were large scale floral, fruit, wood, circle designs; there were a number of “dot” fabrics; and I had a lot of “paper weight” prints in a wide range of colours.

I used the three ombre/three solids as the centre star, then clustered six strong/similar coloured diamonds above and below that star. From there I filled in with the florals/fruit/wood patterns, finally I used the paper weight prints on the outer edges.

I’ve moved quite a few diamonds around already. To fill in the edges I had to cut 18 triangles and 12 more diamonds from some of the strips so there are some duplicate prints but in the centre of the panel each diamond is unique! The outer diamonds on the sides will be trimmed once the panel is sewn together – I don’t need the added width inserting half-diamonds would give me.

I didn’t try creating any kind of colour flow in this layout, although I could have. Instead, I just wanted to let each fabric speak for itself. What I find so interesting is the stars set up an optical illusion of tumbling cubes. When I look at the photo I can pick out the three stars; but as I look at the quilt, stacks of tumbling cubes keep popping out at me! The array of cubes keeps changing, the longer I look. I wasn’t expecting that to happen. 

I like the optical activity this arrangement provides – I’m going to leave it pretty much as it is, I think. However, what I might do next is cut another set of diamonds from the remaining strips (and recut a few more strips from the pieces I put back into the stash) to develop a second array where I start with the stars but colour sort the fabrics to see what illusion might emerge. Wouldn’t take long at all.