Sewing!

Wednesday Evening

After doing a good job (if I say so myself) on our dining room aka my sewing room, today I allowed myself to spend some time sewing.  I attached navy blue borders to a tumbler wall hanging that I had made in 2009 (yikes!).  There is a reason it took me so long to do this simple task.  I had designed some applique to sew on the border and into the wall hanging itself, and at the time I sewed the tumblers together, I wasn't experienced with applique.  Or at least I wasn't experienced to deal with the kind of applique I design.  Now I can handle it but now I also have a multitude of hand sewing tasks to do.  Well, this just gives me one more, and it will provide a respite from the hexagons and the crazy quilt.

After completing that minor task and reviewing the applique design some of which had to be re-sized (a trip to an office supply store to copy the designs is now necessary), I moved on to the Girl Friend quilt Mary Ellen and I are working on.  Well, sort of working on.  We did start in January as we had planned, and we both have blocks cut out, but that's where we put it down.  Today, I thought, would be a good day to make half a dozen blocks if lucky, four if not.  After one block I was ready to give myself a very severe talking to.

We chose a Kim Diehl pattern that we both like, and it's not a difficult one. It is a primarily scrappy churn dash block quilt with equally scrappy sashings and border.  In the center is a large applique section that each of us is going to alter to suit our individual tastes.  It's a GF quilt in that I make two of every churn dash block I make and give her one of them.  She does the same.  We had agreed on our fabric choices and have pretty much the same ones, but we are bound to put them together differently.  Sounds good, doesn't it? 

My problem today was that when I did the first cutting back in January, I neglected to sub-cut the squares to make the triangles for the dashes of the churns.  And I didn't mark the diagonals on the eight 1.5" squares that will make the points of the star that is in the center of the churn dash (since I was making this for a best friend, I felt I should be super accurate and mark those diagonals.  Eight per block.).  Remember for every one block I make for myself, I am making one for Mary Ellen by string piecing as I go.  Today each time I had to get up from the machine to take care of one of the things I had over-looked while cutting, I snarled to myself.  It wasn't a nice sound.

After completing the two blocks, I pulled out all the baggies (each with cut pieces for two identical blocks) and completed sub-cutting to make the triangles.  I even marked the diagonals on 4 or 5 (double the number for both mine and Mary Ellen's) blocks until I decided that she is a very good friend and I could stop.  She won't mind if I take a short cut or if my star points aren't mathematically precise.  I hope.

Now the blocks I had precut are really ready for sewing.  Ready for the next time I sit down to sew.  After spending another day to cut out some more blocks.  You see, I do have a king size bed.

Who said quilting isn't fun?