But here we are, and it's no longer a valid excuse. (Yeah, right, like "oh, I need to look at the wedding photos!" is going to cut it as an excuse. I so don't think so.) Meanwhile, I'd agreed to sew a 12" block for the Chenango Piecemakers guild. The way this works is, they give you some focus fabric (in my case, it's the large scale blue & white print on the outside of the block) and then invite you to make a block on any design you want.This proved to be a good exercise for me. I had bought a CD with a lot of blocks on it, alphabetized, and analyzed in terms of what sized pieces you need to cut. This block is called Memory Wreath; I picked it because it had large areas of the focus fabric. (In fact, the large scale print was supposed to be in the on-point square in the middle, but the amount the guild gave me wasn't large enough to cut out the large triangles and then cut out the middle square. I discovered this tiny detail just too late to reconsider my block choice, or figure out another way to cut the triangle. Hummph.)
The rest of the fabrics are from my stash. I wouldn't have this many blue & white prints except that I collected them for a full year in order to make Coffee Jones's "signature color" quilt. Even so, I fussed about over this one single square until I was happy with the final result. I like it, though, and it also helped me with sewing raw-bias triangles. (That's the hypotenuse of the triangles -- it's on the bias of the fabric, which means it can be pulled out of shape really easily.) I had problems with the Harmony Triangle Quilt, which had a lot of exposed bias edges. This time, I bought some spray starch to stiffen the pieces before I sewed. To almost all of you, this means nothing. But look closely -- the points in this block are pretty good. That means they meet up neatly without getting cut off.
So, that's the first sewing I've done in a while. Next up: the two baby quilts I said I'd make before the children in question enroll in day care...!
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