Traveler Block Tute

Our plane takes off tomorrow, and I still haven't delivered the Traveler block tute! So here it is. You may recall that I made this quilt, originally named "Arkansas Traveler", renamed "Niigata Traveler," for our hosts this upcoming weekend in snowy rural Japan.

Since we will be gone for almost 3 weeks, it was a perfect time to take my sewing machine in for service. Without my sewing machine available to construct a block from scratch, I had to de-construct a couple of leftover blocks to show the process. Let me go backwards then!

Here is the Arkansas traveler block (a little fuzzy, sorry!):

That in fact is what it looks like after it has been trimmed up. To trim it up, you find a 9-inch square on your cutting board, and extend diamond tip point diagonally from one end to another, then trim up. You will notice that the white background is made up of two pieces, a big and a small:

Don't worry about the wonky shape; remember, it's been trimmed up. The small piece can be made from a 2.5-inch strip (measure ~8.5 x 2.5" rectangles and cut diagonally), and the large piece can be made from a 3-inch strip (measure ~10.5 x 3" rectangles and cut diagonally). Or, you can just use the 3-inch strip for both; you'll just have a little more to trim. You sew the triangles along the hypotenuse onto the 4-square diamond (first the small one, then the large one), with the point of the triangle meeting the point of the diamond:

The diamond is made by sewing together two strips of two lozenges. When you sew the right sides together, the whole thing will look like a double tent:

Similarly, when you sew the two lozenges right sides together to make a strip, they look like a single tent:

You may discover that after sewing a bunch of single tents, you have strips going in different directions:

The bad news is that these two kinds of strips will never go together to make a diamond. The good news is that it doesn't matter: once you match each of them to another strip going the same direction, the diamonds they make will be the exact same shape!

If you need guidance for cutting out the lozenges, check my earlier post. Good luck making Arkansas traveler blocks. Next time I check in, I'll be in Japan! Stay tuned for pics from the Tokyo Great International Quilt Festival!