Originally Posted by Sewnoma

One of my grandmothers used to put a humility block or two into a lot of her quilts. (I don't actually think she called them that; the family calls them "special" blocks.) Not quilts she was making for show, but ones she was making for family, mostly. Sometimes it'd be something like a single pinwheel block built going the other way, or maybe one pair of "legs" on a pinwheel would have a subtle print instead of being solid like the rest; stuff like that. It was fun hunting for the special block on the quilts, often it was very subtle and you had to really look to find it. And if you couldn't find it you never knew if there just wasn't one in that quilt, or if it was just so sneaky you hadn't found it yet.

To me that was a sign of extra skill...she was so good she could hide an irregularity right under your nose! My sister & I were often given matching quilts, we could usually only tell them apart by finding those special blocks. Unfortunately most of her quilts that I was given did not survive...my sister & I used the heck out of those quilts. They were capes and fort walls and escape ropes and parachutes...they only live on in pictures and in our memories now but that's a great place for a quilt to live!