rocky road, indeed

The phrase 'frustrated to pieces' now has a particularly vivid association in my mind. These Rocky Road to Kansas blocks are foundation paper pieced according to a tutorial at Fresh Lemons Quilts and were our assignment for January bee blocks. I just finished them last night!

I want to be perfectly clear, there was nothing whatsoever wrong with the pattern or tutorial. I just had the darndest time with these. I didn't enjoy making them much, and it really stalled my sewing (and blogging, for that matter) for the last few weeks since I couldn't move on to other things until these were done. The paper piecing was just frustrating me for some reason. My triangles would not work the way I thought they should and I unpicked quite a few seams.

In the end, I think they turned out looking quite nice though. The fabrics in the blades are all end of bolts sent out to our circle by Stash Fabrics (thanks again!). Judging by the pictures popping up on flickr, we all got different bunches. I like mine a lot, actually! The colors are just my taste so these were really fun to work with and combine in different ways to get two completely different-feeling blocks. 

These are two of my favorite sections. I especially like the colors in that pie chart fabric and the cute purple Russian doll print. Combining randomly sized stripes of all the different scraps made for a really colorful and playful block. I'm curious to see how everyone's blocks end up looking all together.