How to Sew the Snail's Trail Quilt Block

This is a snail’s trail block and it presents some interesting issues about piecing in it and I am going to use it as an example of how to piece at little more difficult block. So, this is the basic patterns, this is what the design is going to look like when it is finished and what I have done is cut out all of my patches and I have laid them out as I am going to saw them. What I do is I create the patches so that I can saw them together all at squares. And what that mean is I will start with the patch that has the most number of pieces in it. So for instance, these four patches in the center, each of them have three pieces. So, I am going to saw these two pieces. These two little triangles together and then add it to that triangle to make a square of patch. And then once I finished those four, I will do these half-square triangles so that I have made squares for those. Once I have all of the patches in squares, then I will be ready to saw them all together to make the block. Now, I have the four quarter square triangles sawn together and I am going to check my pattern to be sure that I have got everything matching up the way it needs to be. So, this is going to be this patch. This patch, green and we have got brown together. Now what I am going to do is saw this four together. Folding them over and basically I am going to be sawing half squares triangles together. You will notice that I have folded the same allowance facing the darker fabric so that it kind of hides behind the darker fabric and would not shift through. Now, I have the four center patches done. These are the most complicated patches, only because they have a few more pieces, but they are done, they are squares and now, I am going to look at what else needs to be put together, sawn together in order to make squares, and what comes up are the half squares triangles. So, they are three of them and those are going to be the next that I sawed together. Now, I have all the patches sawn together, you can see everything inside this block is a square and all I need to do is saw the rows together and then the columns together in order to make a block. Actually what I do is I saw the columns together first. So, I will start by folding these over, change stitching down and then I fold these over, change stitch those together and then change stitch the pair together, the two pairs of rose and then saw the rose together. Now, I have the two rows or two columns sawn together. Again, the threads are holding them together from my chain stitching. What I am going to do lift these two. Put them on top and now, I am going to chain stitch these so that all of my four patches in each row are sawn together. I have all the rows together. You can see, I can spread them apart. They are being held together with the threads. Now, I only need to do is saw them. Saw the rows to each other so that I have make block. And there you have a snail’s trail of block.