Friday, April 20, 2018

Prepping

I've still not been sewing, because our house has been like Grand Central Station lately. Starting today, I have a grandbaby for the rest of the month, so I'm not thinking much sewing will be occurring at all. 

If I can't sew, can I get anything quilty done? Well, yes, I can do some prepping for sewing. I finished cutting strips from the green fabrics I was working on in my last post. I can't sub-cut those until I get the cream fabrics cut into strips. I will have a little bit of time today to press some cream fabrics and strip cut those, then I'm thinking that will be a good naptime activity while I have Mr LJ. I have to keep my cutting sessions short anyway. 

I've also got this going on.


I need to make 1200 Flying Geese units for a quilt I've got planned, and I'm drawing diagonal lines on the squares. I'm drawing the first line corner to corner for my sewing line for the Flying Geese unit, then I'm drawing a second line to get a bonus HST at the size I want. I hate trimming, and cutting is so hard on my arm, that drawing lines is really my best option. Well, I suppose it could be a better option to just cut the units to the correct shapes originally, which I have the rulers to do. I know a lot of people hate doing sew and flip corners. The thing is, I LOVE bonus HST's. I will have 2400 bonus HST's to play with from this quilt...that's another quilt! Does it take more fabric to do it this way? Yes, it does, but I am getting two quilts from that fabric, and there is no waste doing it this way, so, honestly, it really comes down to personal preference. 

Yesterday I actually sat and drew lines on a bunch of squares. During part of that time, I was on the phone with DD#2, and part of the time I was binge watching Dr. Quinn on Amazon Prime. The small baskets are squares I haven't drawn lines on yet, and the plastic shoebox has the squares that are ready to sew. Yesterday was an exception though. Drawing two lines on 2400 squares can be a bit overwhelming, even though I don't mind drawing lines. To prevent feeling overwhelmed, I've been doing 10-20 squares at a time, multiple times per day. Even with a minimum amount of effort, I can get at least 100 squares done per day, so my finished container is filling fairly quickly. I think I can likely continue my mini sessions of line drawing with a baby in the house, so I'm hoping by the end of the month, all of these squares will have lines on them. 


The last of the furniture has been assembled, and I'm really liking the green. It's still a fairly neutral color, but a change from years of brown furniture. 

By the way, since I mentioned I've been binge watching Dr, Quinn, if you are looking for a show with a LOT of quilts in it, that one is great. I had seen the first couple seasons back in the 90's when it was new, but I had never seen that last couple seasons at all. I noticed in season 1 the quilts were made from the wrong era fabrics, but as the seasons went on, the quilts changed and became more appropriate for the time period of the show. 

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