Whacked Trees; the White Blocks

Work continues on the Whacked Christmas trees.  I've been calling them "Whacked" because the cutting method is similar to Stack and Whack but with a twist.  They also are wacky looking!

The blocks with the green backgrounds and the ones with the red backgrounds are all done.  The white backgrounds are next and I really love the prints and colors!  This has been a fun and interesting quilt to make.

For each block it was easy to do the tree trunks, there weren't that many pieces and I could see how they needed to be aligned to account for the 1/4" seams. The top of the trunk section in the picture below was trimmed to give a straight edge but it wasn't straight when I first pieced it.

Piecing the tree body was where the challenges started and continued! There's lots of angles which makes for lots of funky alignments. Before you can add on the next pieces you need to straighten up the edge your going to sew it on to. Can you see the uneven edge between the red tree top and the polka dot piece in the picture below? Once that was trimmed I sewed on the last triangle to finish the block.

By the time I got to the white blocks I had finally figured out that moving that top red tree piece over so that the center of the red triangle lined up with the point of the tree piece below it the tree looked "right". It's supposed to look like it's about to topple off.  As I made the adjustment to each of the white blocks I congratulated myself on how clever I was being!

Now to square them up. I measured the first one on the pile. It was just a liiiittle smaller than the green ones! Oh no not again! You guessed it, they were ALL just a little bit too small.  By shifting the pieces over I had moved the out edges making the width smaller.  I didn't catch on that it was happening when I did the green ones. When I made the additional adjustment to the white ones were all off even more then the green ones.

So I trimmed all the white ones to the smaller size, then I trimmed all the red ones (again), then I trimmed all the green ones (again)!  Finally, the blocks are all the same size. PHEW!

What would Dolly say?   Don't break your arm patting yourself on the back, you're going to need it to fix your mistakes!

Off to the sewing room to sew all 30 of those Whacky Christmas Trees together.