Spelling Bee Quilt - progress 1

It has been hard to resist starting to stitch the blocks for the Spelling Bee Quilt since I prepped some of them.  I said I would just do A and then get back to cutting, but well ...

B happened too, of course.

Then I thought I'd just have a stab at the sewing machine block because it's so cute, and here I am

with the blocks for the first half of the quilt's top row.  

Truth is, the little sewing machine block is a whole other ball game, in terms of stitching, from the letters.  Remember it's 6.5" square with ALL those pieces!! If you look closely at the block pic, you'll see I lost some of the corners that are supposed to shape the sewing machine control knobs.  It's bothering me, but I cannot decide if I can bring myself to unpick and restitch them.  The control-freak-perfection-aiming part of me very much wants to fix it.  The exhausted mother of CT wonders if it will "do".  

I'll think about it ...

When I realised that the piecing for this quilt is so small and sectional, I thought it would be a really good candidate for sewing up some leaders and enders alongside the actual blocks.  As I need to remove a stitched section from under my needle, I can just pop in a leader/ender pair to avoid thread wastage and keep the machine from gathering up at the start of the next bits of sewing.  I've pulled out my 2.5" squares box and am going to make nine patches (for an eventual scrappy Irish Chain, I think) as I sew. It'll be like a bonus project taking shape alongside!