Winter Mystery Quilt along clue 3 is here!

Good Morning to everyone!  here is your clue 3 for the Winter Mystery Quilt Along!

Are you all ready?

Today you will be sewing hourglass blocks and I have a very cool way of doing them without dealing with triangles!  I am sure you are happy about this neat little trick.  

Cutting Instructions

So today you will need 18 backgrounds cut at 7 1/4" this will either be you light or your dark fabric

Then you will need of your 18 Medium fabrics cut at 7 1/4".  I am using two colours for my mediums and if you are doing this cut 10 of one colour and 8 of the other.

Preparation and Sewing Instructions 

Squares ready to be prepared for sewing

Mark each medium fabric with a pencil diagonally like this

You may use a pencil or you may use a hera marker like I did to form a crease in the fabric that you can see so you can use this as a guide.   Pair your mediums with a background fabric square with right sides facing.   Off to the machine we go and we will sew a 1/4" seam either side of this marked diagonal line.

You should now have 2 sewn lines like this

Place your ruler point to point diagonally on the opposite diagonal to you have sewn

Cut the fabric from point to point diagonally on the opposite of the sewn diagonal like in above diagram and below.  Then cut on the drawn or marked line inbetween your stitching.  

this is what you will now have.

Open up the pieces and you will now have four quarter square triangles ready to make into hourglass blocks.

cut units to make hour glass blocks

Press your seems to the dark side, in my case this was my medium fabrics.   Making sure you but the centre seems together to have a neat fitting block and then sew this seam to form your hourglass blocks.

Pink ones sewn Yellow to be sewn

Ta Da!  You are almost complete.  If you did not hear on the first clue I accidentally recalculated my calculations and halved the amount of four patches you need so you will need to make another 36 four patches before next weeks clue.  

unit blocks and totals for the quilt so far

72 four patch units

9 Uneven 9 patches

36 hourglass blocks

I really hope you are enjoying this quilt,  next week sees the final clue and the making up of the quilt. I have actually purchased a striped binding for mine and a Star background which you can see in last nights blog post here

Also remember Announcement of Mystery can be found here

                          clue 1 can be found here

                          clue 2 can be found here

You can join us on Facebook Wehago Designs Quilting Community or on Instagram with #wintermystery2016.  

Looking forward to seeing your quilt come together like mine is and all the different combinations of fabrics and colours.  It truly is amazing how we can make a quilt look different by our different choices of fabrics and colours and make them look so totally rockstarish!

So this is your EARLY Friday post to start your weekend off in a great way!

We are heading into a very cold patch of weather today so if you are in my part of the world rug up and stay safe and to everyone else take care and stay safe and we will meet back here again very soon.

signing off to go and get ready to quilt some more an another project.1

Wendy