Thursday, June 23, 2011

First two weeks - caught up!

It's official - I'm in the Farmer's Wife Quilt-a-Long.  I've got four blocks done and I'm seeing why people are enjoying this so much.

Clockwise from top left:  #1 Attic Windows; #4 Basket Weave; #9 Box; #5 Bat Wing.

I am doing two at a time in each focal print - I have a third print to do, but since we are in week 4, I can get caught up pretty quickly. 

There are two main things I am enjoying about this.  One is that I'm finding bits and pieces in my stash that go with these prints and it's so much fun.  I have so many random scraps or 6" squares of fabrics and have never had any idea of what to do with them.  When something matches the focal print so well, it's like a little celebration happening in my sewing room.  I start flipping through the book to find something to do with it.

The other thing, surprisingly, is working with the templates.  I've never had the patience for templates - I do the math and cut strips and squares and such.  But after reading the words from those who started on time, I thought I'd slow down and do the templates (and this was confirmed after measuring some of the templates and finding my Omnigrid ruler wouldn't get as exact as the templates).  Angela has a good blog post on the ease of the clipped corners here - it reminds me of Inklingo although I haven't gotten around to trying that yet either - and it really is lovely how the tiny pieces just match up.  The only thing I need to worry about is my seam allowances.  True, it can take three times as long to cut a block than to sew it, but because of the pace of the Quilt-A-Long, I'm not finding that annoying.

Tonight is hand sewing night at my friend Kitty's house.  I am deliberating whether to bring the Drunkard's Path blocks I'm hand piecing (first time ever trying hand-piecing) or to bring fabric and book and templates and cut some more FW blocks.

2 comments:

  1. I like how your doing two blocks of each focal fabric. I am in awe of your Civil War Chronicle, that is a BIG undertaking. If you can handle that, the FWQA should be no problem. Welcome to the blog land!

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  2. Thanks! It's a different challenge with each, too, because of the busy-ness of the prints, the size of them. It's an interesting twist I hadn't expected.

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