Follow Your Heart: Hampton Roads + Silicon Hills

Welcome to a new week! This is the final week of January already, I seen a post on Instagram earlier this week about how fast this year is going and I have to agree!
We are working on two blocks this week for the Follow Your Heart Quilt Along. I was able to finish both of them in a couple hours so don't worry about it taking forever.
The blocks are Hampton Roads on page 20 and Silicon Hills on page 26. These are the only two applique blocks in the quilt. If you haven't done any applique recently it is a good idea to take out some scraps, and go through steps G-J on page 21 and 22 before doing the applique on your quilt blocks. It will give you a chance to adjust your stitches until you are happy with them, as well as get the feel of turning your fabrics, where the foot should sit on your fabric to get a nice edge stitch. Make a note of which stitch you like and the width and length, so you don't forget and can use the same one on both blocks.
I did find the Silicon Hills block easier for the applique even though it has a little more, the circles are larger, and the arrows are all straight lines, so if you are nervous start with that block. I did all the applique in a light grey thread, rather than trying to match each color of my fabrics.

Hampton Roads: For the cutting I did change up a couple things. Under the dark print it says to cut a 4.5"x21" strip and cut triangles using rulers. Instead I cut one 4.5"x8.5" rectangle and two 4.5" squares. I did the same for the assorted whites. Than in step E I made my flying geese following the stitch and flip method, just like in step A of the Circle Pines block.
Also because I am using just one background fabric I cut 2 strips the size mentioned at the end of Step A rather than piecing the three smaller lengths together.
If you are worried about your fabric shrinking some during the applique, you could always cut that rectangle larger as well, do the applique, trim it to the correct size and than piece the block together.
There is a template for the circle on page 22, so you don't have to freehand one, I was flipping through the book looking for it, and all I had to do was turn the page. If you have an Accuquilt GO machine and a circle die you could definitely use that to cut your circles instead, just be sure to fuse some trans web or steam a seam to the wrong side of the fabric before cutting, so that the glue will go all the way to the outside edge of your circle.
Don't forget to add the borders as listed on page 22 to finish off the block.

Silicon Hills: This one I did as per instructions. My fabric doesn't have a huge color scale difference, so I mostly just made sure I had a lot of contrast between the circle fabric and the arrow that went on top of it. The templates for tracing are on page 28. Once again don't forget to add the borders. When we go to assemble all the blocks in a couple months you will be glad they all have borders, otherwise you will searching through the book trying to find out where you went wrong.

Have fun making these blocks!
Kayla