Civil War block 6: Richmond

This week's block in the Civil War Quilt is in memory of Varina Howell Davis, who became the First Lady of the Confederacy.  Read more of the story on Barbara Brackman's blog.

I found the fabric selection for this week a little challenging.  I wanted to stick with my plan to use fabric from projects I had been working on this week, but of course I'm still working on the Music Quilt and the Baby Elephants, which is the fabric that most of the blocks have been made of so far.  I don't want too many of my blocks to end up the same.

I had really wanted to use some of the left over fabric from the Birdie Stitches blocks, because I have been sewing those together this week as well, but they are jelly roll strips and wouldn't have worked for the larger pieces of this block.  I did consider making the larger pieces out of strips sewn together but then the maths of it plus making sure I had straight grain around the edge of my block just seemed to hard.  In the end I went with the backing fabric from the Baby Elephants for the centre star and fabric from the top of the Baby Elephants for the rest of it.  If you look closely you can see an elphant peeking out of the centre block of this one.

Barbara notes on her blog that the block is sometimes referred to as 'Butterfly'.  Mary of Quilting in OZ also notes that the block is sometimes called "Aunt Vina's Favorite", "Pinwheel" , "Butterfly" and several others.  Mary has posted lots of pictures of this block, but I noticed that the different placement of the colour values produced a rather different looking block.  It got me wondering if the different names of the blocks actually represent the different ways of placing the colour values... Something maybe I can research one day when I have nothing else to do.  I think my favourite of Mary's quilts is the green one at the end of her post.

.... and I only just realised the error I made with placing the four patch blocks!  Two of them have the white towards the centre and two have the purple!  That might explain why my star in the middle didn't show up as nicely as I hoped.  Oh, well.  Maybe I'll come back to it later in the year and re-do those sections, but not this week.