Techniques to handle awkward little corners

Note:When looking through past posts I noticed I have over 120 tagged as tips, technique, tutorials, etc.  I've decided to do a fine tuning on some of them for two reasons...first so they are easier to understand and second to allow me to travel down memory lane through many of my favorite crazy-quilting projects.

 

Techniques to handle awkward little corners (2014)

 

When you are piecing a block you quite often end up with an awkward  corner really too small for a motif treatment..  And this block is a good example except that it has four such corners.  I could put a little motif in each corner but that would not help the problem. 

 

I have a bag of tricks for just this very thing...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.  I try to bring the patch into block by moving some of its color and adding something that makes the shape less defined.  This time I chose flowers the same shade as the block and moved some down onto the purple along with some foliage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. For the upper right corner I chose something bold to attach to it to make it work as a larger unit.  Notice how it overlaps the seams to help include the small patch into the block as a whole.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. Another option is bring some element from the block down into that patch and it just disappears..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. Sometimes rather than make a small patch seem larger I divide and conquer to make it smaller... With two or more pieces of trim you can downsize a patch.  On fact it becomes so small it hardly seems like a patch at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So now there is some variation in the four small corners which were so similar in size and they all have their own personality..

 

5. Another technique I use often and could have used here is to add a coordinating trim (usually ribbon) to make a block larger.    In this case I could have added a wide purple ribbon to the little purple corner patch which would have doubled its size and made the turquoise  patch smaller.   I use this technique often...

And now the tail...  I didn't want to mark on top of the block so I turned it over and sketched a tail.  I already had the peacock body in place so positioning it was no problem.  Then I did quick basting stitches over my lines.

Then I could turn it back over and embroider over my basting stitches.  I use this technique over and over and over again and have long meant to write a proper tutorial on it... Mary Corbet had an article recently on transferring designs and working from the back wasn't mentioned so I am determined to get a tutorial worked up and send it to her....

So I used all the colors in the block in the peacock tail and carried it right down into the pesky little corner patch!!!!!