Whacked Tree Pieces

The Christmas Tree quilt is coming along nicely! 

Once all the cutting and swapping was done I started the piecing.  One of the hard parts about these types of blocks is that the cutting does not take into consideration the seam allowances so you have to watch out for alignments. The finished blocks look pretty rough when they are done but they get trimmed to square them up.

I started with the blocks that had the red background pieces. I was pretty proud of myself when I got all 10 of them all done and trimmed to size. It took two or three evenings but I was happy with my progress.  I put the blocks up on my design wall to keep them safe from Guppy and Alice.

The following night I went back to the sewing room to start the green blocks. As I admired my work from the night before I noticed that the piece of the tree at the very top looked a bit "off". 

Maybe it was the colors, not enough contrast I thought. Or maybe it's the angle. That sharp point doesn't show up very well. OK, I'll adjust that top piece when I do the green ones.  Move it over to the left a little and that should take care of it. 

Here's what the red ones looked like.

Here's what the green ones look like.  Still a not well defined but I didn't want to take them all out so on to trimming.  I checked the finished size of the red blocks and wrote the measurements down so I could remember them. 

I grabbed the first finished green block to square it up. It was just a liiiittle smaller than the red ones, about 1/4" in the width. I checked several more and they were all the same, off by just a bit. Since I need the blocks to all be the same size I trimmed all the green ones to the smaller size and then trimmed all the red ones to the smaller size too.  

Ahh, 20 blocks completed.  On to the white blocks.