I had to make a choice this week about which fall project to tackle first.
And the quilt won. Mostly because I am going to be traveling for a lot of October and figured the sweater would be a good adventure for while I am up with my parents in Sacramento. I am hoping to find a knitting/yarn store near them to ask for help and get started. I really appreciated all your advice last week on knitting - I'm excited.
And I am also really excited about this quilt.
I picked up fabric, a rotary cutter, cutting mat and ruler a few days ago. Cutting the fabric was easy. I made blocks that were 5x11 inches (if I did it again, I might go smaller). Sewing the blocks into strips was also easy. Getting the strips to all line up correctly? Not so easy.
But of course, I knew that would be the case. I have some practice with carefully lining up fabric from when I made our chevron headboard, but that was on a smaller scale and I was dealing with pre-printed fabric. Not Sewn-by-Impatient-Elise fabric.
I bet you can guess where this is going...
And you're right. I'm rolling with it. Imperfect match-ups and everything.
When I sewed the first two columns together I realized they were a bit off. And I took an hour break to decide if I was going to rip it all up and start over or if I was going to press on. Because OH MAN, I wanted them to be perfect. But DUDE, I not want to start over.
So I compromised with myself and I focused harder on the other strips. I am working on keeping my seam allowances the same. I am ironing every seam. I am pinning as much as I can. And it's improving. It's not perfect and it's not going to be. (And I know the puckering and wrinkles shown above are probably making quilters out there cringe. I'm sorry!) But I love the subtle fabric colors. I really love the style. I think it's going to be rad with our headboard and I know it will set the tone for our next bedroom.
And my other quilt, from last January? I'm still a fan. It's going to stay in the rotation for sure. Maybe for summer? We'll see.
Anyway - lots to do. I am about 50% done with the top. Then I need to get the layers and actually quilt it all together. I have a plan for how I am going to do that and it's different than the hand-stitching from last time. It might be too ambitious, but I think it will work out anyway.
Hopefully I'll have more to share next week.
Tomorrow is the last day to shop the print & poster sale.
I still have seats available in the Blog 2.0 workshop which starts Monday. More details here.
