The block was together in next to no time. The flying geese, HST and QST units were incredibly easy and fast to do with Inklingo and I had absolutely no precision rotary cutting to do, no curious math to cope with, no stretchy bias edges to deal with and no bits of paper to pick off. For a novice at machine piecing, I’m pretty pleased with how the block turned out.

I have been using Inklingo for about a year and a half now and have made countless hand-pieced items, including the shabby chic king-sized quilt, but decided to find out what machine piecers love about Collection 2 — and I’m sold! This may actually encourage me to become a machine piecer for some blocks.

The only real problem I had was with the bulky seam intersections when sewing the rows together to complete the block. My machine seemed to really labour at the intersections and then the seams tended to get a bit crooked. I’m sure this is me not having experience using the sewing machine for piecing and I intend to try another block of the Christmas Star on the weekend when I have more time and see if I can put together a perfect one.

All in all, although this block will go into the orphan block box, I’m very pleased with how it turned out. I’m enough of a perfectionist that I want to do better. One thing’s for sure — I will be able to make this quilt top really fast! I had the pieces printed and was at the sewing machine within minutes.