Chuckles cheered me up

Chuckles is a great name for this little clown fish block.  After all the reverse stitching with Anjelica he certainly put a smile back on my face. If you'd like to join our block of the month program, you can sign up here. 

The BOM is 9 x $55 monthly instalments.  As well as posting tips as we sew, I've sorted all of your fabrics for you into the monthly packs.  How easy is that?

I'm running late with Chuckles and you may have thought that I'd fallen off the Awesome Ocean bandwagon after all the trouble I had with that feisty angel fish (you can read about it here).  Its not the case as I launched into Chuckles just a few days later.  Its just the blogging that I fell behind on, as our brand new Free-Wheeling Single Girl templates took off with a bang, and things have been crazy busy around here ever since.

Lets recap

Many of the tips I have shared in past posts are relevant when you make Chuckles.  Here's a quick roundup:

Be systematic

Cut multiple layers at once and clip your pieces together so you are ready for some speedy chain piecing.  Read about how I organise them here 

Straight strip sets

Chuckes has some narrow strips in his tail and body.  Press your seams open and use the left hand side of the presser foot as a guide when sewing those narrow strip sets. I included more info and images back in the post about Puffy here

Be careful with those angles

It will seem pretty familiar as you make Chuckles' body and tail units as we used a similar technique when making Angelica. Be sure to check those angles are going the right way before cutting.  I find it helps to visualise the Sydney Harbour bridge.  Here is a pic of the 'bridge and pilons' from Angelica, but go back and review the Angelica post here    

Get those fins right

Once you have made Chuckles' head and body you are ready to make and attach the fins.  They're easy to sew, but yet again you will want to pay close attention to the angles.  

One you have stitched rectangles N and G together give them a good press and divide them into two stacks (see below) as the upper and lower fins are mirrored versions of one another.

Read your pattern carefully and follow the diagrams - you can't go wrong.  Because I'd rather look at a picture than read text, I found it useful to check I had mine right against Elizabeth Hartman's pattern like this:

....and this:

After another good press, I divided my fin units up in two piles again.

Then I arranged my fin stacks with the body and head units like this.  A last look at the block diagram told me that those fins were backwards (we don't want Chuckles floating belly up).  After a quick flip of that body I was set for more speedy chain piecing.

One more seam to attach the tail and Chuckles was done.

Next month we will be stitching Preppy the Whale so check back soon.

How great will it be to work with those big pieces?  There's also new fabrics from the Reef collection which we haven't  used yet.  Whohoo!