The black background blocks are hand stitched. I pressed under the edges first, so it's real easy to do a running stitch to sew them down. This picture is up close, the actual stitches are about 1/16" to 1/8" long
Was is neat with the batiks, when you press just the smidge of the edge, it holds itself like that, so you can trim and snip and then press down. I use a flat iron (no steam vents) to do this. Don't attempt it with steam or you'll scald your fingers! I leave the fabric long for the first pressing as it's much easier to manipulate that way.
Batik even finger presses quite well.
The cream are my test blocks - machine stitched
And the gold will be machine stitched. This is the one I really wanted to do for this QAL
