6/27/05
I finished putting all the pieces onto the fusible interfacing (I ran out yesterday, and went with K. to get some more on the way home from a christening). I used 7.5 yards of interfacing total. The square in the middle of the picture is a cd case, to give some perspective on the scale of the quilt. The size right now is 107x107--it will go down to 71x71 for the pieced portion once it is sewn together. There will be 14 inches of borders (in yellow & blue) before it is finished. I will start the actual sewing shortly, and hopefully will have the majority finished within three weeks.
(Click on the picture to enlarge.)
6/18/05
I have over a third of the quilt fused to the backing (just over 2100 pieces). This is rather tedious, but works well in front of the tv. My only goal is that I don't have two pieces of the same fabric touching at more than a diagonal. Other than that, the piecing of the reds & greens is rather random.
6/12/05
Spent 8+ hours putting the pieces on fusible webbing. Here are a couple of process shots. After the pieces are placed, they have to be ironed down.
6/5/05
Spent about an hour today cutting out the multicolored squares. I have all the reds and greens done. Tomorrow, after council, I will try and do either the white or the yellow. I am planning on saving the blue until I have a better idea how I am going to lay it out. I also found another chunk of the blue fabric at Joann's today, which was good because it looked like I was cutting it very close with what I had.
The process I used on the squares was to cut strips that were 1 1/2" by the width of the fabric (which varied from 41 to 45), and then layer those strips and cut them into 1 1/2" squares. A few years ago, I bought a tool that makes this process very simple to work with. It has slits cut in plexiglass every 1/2" inch, so you can easily cut through many layers of fabric accurately with a rotary cutter.
6/4/05 7:26 pm
I finished washing & ironing the fabric. It took quite some time. But I have pictures to show now.
The Reds: The Greens:
The Blue The Yellow
6/4/05 4:18 pm
Got home from class & went to switch fabric. The laundry room floor was COVERED in water, which had spread to the carpeting in the sewing room. The plumber, who yesterday did a system flush on the hot water heater, did not reconnect the drain pipe from the washing machine. I really cannot express in words exactly how unhappy I am right now. I found all the pieces to the wet/dry vacuum & sucked up at least four gallons of water. I don't know what happened to the rest of it. To make the situation better, the fabric that hadn't been washed yet was sitting next to the washing machine on the floor, and is now covered in a mixture of water, soap, and kitty litter clay, as the kitty litter is next to the washing machine and the cats aren't the most tidy things around. I am not happy at the moment.
6/4/05
Started to wash the fabric. I am not looking forward to the ironing portion at all. Will post pictures soon.
6/3/05
As K. had other plans tonight, I went out looking for fabric for the new quilt. I have decided to get 14 colors to be in the variegated portion (7 greens & 7 reds, in shades from very light to very dark). I will be posting pictures as soon as the fabric has been washed. Managed to get all the fabric & the fusible interfacing grid for the squares for a not too unreasonable amount of money.
6/1/05
I decided to start working on a new quilt for my bed, as the old one has just about bit the dust. I came up with this design, with a grid of 71 by 71 one inch squares with a two inch yellow border followed by a six inch blue border. I designed it using the PatternMaker for Cross Stitch program.
For those of you doing the math, there will be 5041 squares total, with 634 blue squares, 704 yellow squares, 1657 white squares, and 2046 variegated squares.