Weekend Recap

I've been a good little worker bee this last couple of days.

I picked my fabrics for the Test Your Skills Sampler. I designed my quilt top for the Modern Quilt Guild Kona Solids Only Challenge.

I even got some actual sewing in. I made the four 3" nine patch blocks for TYSS, and half the large snowball/nine-patch block. I have to re-do the snowballs - my piecing was somehow inaccurate, and they didn't match seams correctly with the nine-patch blocks. I'm anal enough that it just wasn't acceptable, so I threw the boo-boos in the scrap basket. Since they're just nine patches, I didn't bother to photograph them. When I get a little further into the TYSS, I'll post photos.

#071 Puss in the Corner

More fussy cutting, and that awesome Walmart fabric makes another appearance. Sadly, I even got anal retentive about how I cut the dots.

#093 Swallow

I deliberately went with lower contrast fabrics with this block. I have a lot of very dark, and a couple of very light, blocks. I need some middle ground to help keep the eye moving over the (eventual) quilt top.

Both prints are Walmart fabrics, and I'm still having some fun playing with fussy-cutting. I've determined that I would NEVER do it for a large quilt, but one off/sampler blocks, I'm okay with fussy-cutting.

I've also gone and pre-cut the fabric for another fix or six Farmer's Wife blocks, so I'll be ready for another round of sewing. I went through the book, did the quilt-y math and scribbled my own rotary cutting directions onto each page. I've also gone and denoted those that I feel need paper-piecing. In addition to those, I've found that there are a number of five by five grid blocks which would require me to cut things at 1/5 of an inch. The very idea makes my head hurt, so I'm going to be figuring out if I want to substitute blocks. 

I have a ton of scraps, a good portion of which I reduced to strips about a year ago. My sampler projects aren't helping the scrap situation much. Okay, not at all. I've been generating scraps far faster than I've been using them. I determined that it was time to start working on my strip quilt.

Sometime into one of the more recent batches of Farmer's Wife blocks, I realized that I should just use the string blocks as my leader/ender project. *facepalm* Why didn't I think of this before? These blocks would have gone so much faster!

Two days, nine blocks, one design and a bunch of pre-cutting done. It's been a good weekend.