The fabric is directional, and I like the idea of square in a square units (which the original pattern used) The thing is, to keep the fabric in the correct orientation when traditionally making the block, I would have had to cut the center squares on the bias, and I'd have wasted quite a bit of fabric. What I decided to do instead was use sew and flip corners to make the square in a square units. I drew a 2nd line and sewed on it to get a bonus HST, and since I had a bonus HST from each corner, I could make pinwheels with those, and I could keep all the fabric right side up! My square in a square blocks will finish at 6", but the pinwheels only finish at 4" so I framed them to bring them up to size. I'll use these blocks alternately to border the quilt. No wasted fabric and no extra units lying around!
I've got the center of the quilt up on the design wall. The HST's and QST's are already pieced, so it's ready to assemble now. I've been trying to use the smallest pieces I have that are large enough to get the job done. Both the light pink and dark pink (after reserving enough of the dark pink for an inner border) only have a strip or two left going into my scrap user system. I actually misjudged the white, and the last two border blocks use a different white. The greens and blues came out of the scrap user system, and pretty much wiped out those shades in my 2.5" strip drawers.
I went all of January without buying any fabric. I'm not no-buy, I just didn't want to buy any fabric until I needed it. Today I bought fabric, because when I was cutting out some units to finish a UFO, I ran out of the Kona silver I was using for the background. I have a ton of bonus HST's leftover from another UFO, and I decided to use them in a Lady of the Lake quilt. All the bonus HST's use Kona Silver as the neutral, so now that I'm making large HST's for the center of the Lady of the Lake blocks, I wanted to use Kona Silver again. After cutting what I had, I realized it wasn't enough, and I hadn't cut out setting triangles yet either, so I ordered more today, and that was ALL I ordered, nothing else was added to cart, just Kona silver. I am out of most of the colored fabrics I used in the original bonus HST's, but since it's scrappy anyway, I'll just pull some fabrics from stash in the same colors. The background was all the same, so I don't feel the least bit bad about buying more background fabric. After all, I literally have thousands of bonus HST's with Kona silver as the background, and I can make a really nice quilt with them with more background fabric. No one need know it was a "leftover unit" quilt.
If you think it's amazing I only bought one fabric, I can do one better than that! I went to Target the other day to buy a replacement slow cooker. The one I was replacing had a broken lid. It was also 30 years old and the plug was getting hot so I figured it was time to replace it anyway. I went to the kitchen section of Target, grabbed the slow cooker I wanted, looked around the store a bit, and went to check out with only the slow cooker! I only bought one item at Target, and it was the one I went there for, that might be the first time that's ever happened to me!
No comments:
Post a Comment