Starting a Quilt
Honestly this quilt was first started sometime in 2005. I think it was in the fall that I bought a couple of yards of the VW fabric and maybe the black and white one. I thought they'd be perfect for a quilt for my son that would be cool for several years. In January of 2006 I bought the red, blue, green and yellow with a gift card my MIL gave me for Christmas. And somehow I used MS Word to design it on 2-3-2006. Now over 2 years later, I've picked it up again. The only reason I know all of this is because I have a graph paper notebook I keep my quilting and sometimes my sewing ideas in. Its not very full but the earliest dated idea was from 2002! I feel lost every time I lose this notebook. I also had all the fabrics and some sketches in a bag together so it was just sitting there waiting for me to get going.
With my main design finished a long time ago, last week I started doing the calculations for my son's quilt. I figured out how much fabric I have, how much I need to use, what I need to cut and how much I have left over. I've been putting off doing this quilt because I haven't been very confident of my sewing skills and the pattern uses Marti Michell's acrylic templates for hexagon quilts. My husband had bought them for me one year for my birthday I think. I love all the great patterns you can make from them but I've been nervous about cutting into my expensive fabric and getting it all wrong. Sixty degree angle pieces look very difficult to sew. I've used them on cheaper fabrics and with all the sewing I've been doing lately I finally felt brave enough to do it.
Saturday, 4/26/2008, I started the ironing and the cutting. I just wanted to start on the center medallion so I only cut those pieces. In the process of cutting those out I already had to go back and refigure some of my calculations because the borders were not going to work out the way I wanted. I was going to cut the border strips out on the lengthwise grain but when I looked at the fabric I didn't like the repetition of the print that way so now I'm going to use the crosswise grain.
On Monday, with all my pieces cut and ready to sew I laid them out on my cutting mat to make an aesthetic layout with only my focus fabric. I wanted the red cars and the blue busses to not bunch up together. So I ended up with this:
center pieces
Then I removed half of them and added in the colored fabrics according to my sketches:
original placement
I didn't like the green diamonds touching each other so I tried a another variation:
variation 1
I liked that even less so I went back to the original configuration. Then I sewed one up and then another.
variation final
Do you see a difference? The green is no longer touching. I accidentally flipped a couple of the pieces upside down but it looks better this way to me. I was so thrilled at my happy accident!
Here's my progress after one day of sewing
end of day two - 4 blocks pieced.
I'm not revealing the final look of the quilt until it is finished. It is going together much faster than I imagined. I think I could have the center done in about 3 more days of working on it. Unfortunately I haven't been able to get back to it and now my relatives will be coming in town for Memorial Day. I've got a ton of cleaning to do but I will still probably get some more of this done, just slower than I'd like. And I'd like to show my MIL that I'm working on something.