The devil is in the details- Girl Skipping Rope take 2

     After 3 days of sewing, unsewing, design tweaking, and re-working an entire section, the first paper-pieced block I've ever designed and drafted on my own is done.  So much work never went into a 10-inch block!  
     Meet Ginger:

    

She's more than a little patchy- a testament to my lack of paper-piecing skills.  The head section was the part I had to tweak.  Those pesky y-seams!  The second incarnation was done without them, and came out much neater.  There are a few other spots that didn't need to be chopped up so much, but I wasn't looking at the big picture when I was piecing, and then the block came out a rectangle.  For me, squaring up meant adding fabric, not trimming back! 
    Nevertheless, I think she turned out well (I can't bring myself to refer to her as an inanimate object.  We spent too much time together).  I'm very sad to see her go (as are my children), but this week she'll be on her way to her new home in Melbourne, Australia.  Hope you like her, Jane! 
     Next month's Piece Bee With You block shouldn't be so much of a struggle for me now that I've got one under my belt.  Some takeaways from constructing Ginger:

• The first sketch should not be the final draft
• Draft the design using squares, rectangles and triangles.  Here I did the opposite- chopping the design up into squares, rectangles and triangles, which resulted in umpteen teeny pieces
• Avoid y-seams if at all possible
• Know the targeted block size beforehand
• Measure twice, cut once (an oldie but goodie)

Just for fun, here is a pictorial history of Ginger's progression (first blogged here):