I’m trying to do a better job of blogging more regularly.  A big part of that is that I tend to wait for a quilt finish to write about it so my blog posts are limited by the rate of my finishes.  That seems silly, so I’m going to try and do better with it!

I really love Karen Lewis’ Blueberry Park fabric line.  Love it so much that I just keep buying more!  I used my blue and green fat quarters last year to make my Drunken Blueberry quilt.   Along the way I also purchased 3 charm packs of the yellow/orange/red colorway, but had a hard time trying to decide what to do with them.  I do really like circles in quilts, so I bought a Classic Curves ruler from Color Girl Quilts, but again took my time trying to decide how to use it.  I finally decided to figure out how to make pieced orange peel blocks using the ruler and my 5″ charms.

It took a little experimentation, but I figured out how to make them.  You basically just make 2 drunkards path blocks.

I started by pulling my fabric – the charms and my background fabric.  The background is Meissen Blue by RJR Fabrics.

I used the ruler along the 5″ line to cut the charms to make the concave side of the first drunkard’s path block.

I made the concave side from the background, again using the 5″ line and the instructions for cutting 2 out from the same piece.

I pretty good at curved piecing, but only if I pin the heck out of the blocks before sewing them.  This takes a lot of time, but doing it in front of the TV at night makes it go pretty quickly.

After sewing the first curve I pressed the seams and trimmed the blocks.  I trimmed the background to 3/8″ on each side of the colored quarter circle, then flipped it around to square it to 5″.  Lots and lots of trimming!

Next I cut the new drunkard’s path block to make a new concave piece.  Here is the ruler and lining it up on the 5″ line:

and trimming:

The next step was to add another convex piece to this block and trim the new orange peel block down to a 5″ finished block.

This is the pattern I drew up – we’ll see how far I get with the charm packs I have and how much negative space I want to use:

I think it should be really cool!