On my last quilty post, I said that I was busy working on a different quilt that was my own design.

I thought about that statement quite a bit after it was posted. I’ve actually been working on a BLOCK. Not an entire quilt. (Although I hope to turn it into an entire quilt!)

And this block is not my “own” design. If you have graph paper, ruler, and a pencil, you can copy a pieced block. And that’s what this is. Graph paper. Ruler. Pencil. Someone else created this heart block many years ago. Perhaps even decades or centuries. Quilting has been around for a looooooong time.

For me, this block started four years ago when I had the audacity to do a calendar quilt as a quilt-along. It was fun. No one else joined in on my block-of-the-month. But. One block got a lot of views. And that was this one.

I based that block on a quilt I saw on a blog. And that blog had only snapped a photo of the quilt in a quilt shop. It’s basically a log cabin in heart shape.

When I sat down with my graph paper, ruler, and pencil to draw out the block, I realized that something wasn’t quite right.  Log cabins should just click together and build on one another but there were two pieces that didn’t seem to fit the pattern.  Then I enlarged the pic and realized that they were actually the same fabric but in two different pieces.

What?  Here, I’ll show you. See that purply and orangey sections? Those are actually two pieces of fabric put together to look as one. Clever!

Anyhow….I’ve been wanting to revisit this block since I made the calendar quilt back in 2016. But there has always been something else that I was working on. This year is no different but now I’m making it a priority.

I’ve made several different blocks based on the pattern. And I’ll probably make several more before I land on what will be the “perfect” block.

Meanwhile, I have been turning those test blocks into Valentine “Makes”.

I’m not quite ready to share any tutorials for the blocks since I’m still playing around with the layouts and really need to do more testing. I will be the first to admit that a lot of my designs are full of mistakes. If anyone wants to test–I would be happy to send you the patterns!

I should be ready to share the patterns for the heart block next Thursday!