Buzzsaw - Red Sky at Night Quilt.

My Dad was a carpenter when I was a little girl. And I have such strong memories of the smell of freshly cut timber. Watching him make homes and furniture was like watching someone with super powers. He knew what to put with what, and how. And then what to do next, and then next. Anyone who's had a five year old, knows they already know everything. But I can still, so accutely, feel that feeling I experienced back then. I do not know that. And I wanted to know.
I remember feeling the same learning to read, or being surrounded by a foreign language in Poland, watching someone play the piano. It still feels special to me that my earliest memory of that longing starts with my Dad.
I never did learn to work with timber. My school, as many schools do, spent a lot of time prioritizing integers and quotients, which I can't for the life of me remember what they do, nor do I care, than working with my hands. It's a pity, because I'd love to be able to just whip up a set of drawers for my scraps! But it was that same feeling that drove me to keep learning to quilt, to sew things together and see what happens. For my first two quilts, I just made up the binding! And then slowly, as I became more excited and motivated, I started looking up tutorials, even though I much prefer to have someone tell me how to make something, rather than read it.
And it's pretty wonderful having a skill that I can slowly teach my kids. Something I'm really good at, that they don't know yet. My own super power.

BUZZSAW 12" BLOCK TUTORIAL:
You will need:

Red: Four 6.5" x 2.5" rectangles, four 4.5" x 2.5" rectangles.

White: Four 6.5" x 2.5" rectangles, four 4.5" x 2.5" rectangles.

1. Take the 4.5" strips and place the white one over the red one and sew diagonally across the corner. (see next picture for example)

2. Trim the corner off and press open.

3. Lay out the 6.5" red and white strips on either side of the combined strip as below. Sew them together. Press open.

4. Repeat with all four quadrants of the block and lay out as below. All blocks are exactly reversible, so you can make the white on the outside, or the red.

5. Sew the top two squares together, and the bottom two. Press and sew the final seam.

This block repeats beautifully if made into a whole quilt, because the white border becomes its own repeating buzzsaw shape. Scrappy boy colours are being added my my make list!