Weekend Progress Report

I had a really productive weekend, quilt-wise! I spent a big chunk of Saturday fabric shopping with my husband and Ellen. I got a bunch of new fabrics for birthday and Christmas surprise gifts, which was fun but also a little scary, because now I'm committed to actually making the gifts: 5 quilts. By December. Whew.

I also spent my birthday gift certificate on fabric. I got a big stack of Kaffe Fassett fat quarters in ridiculously vibrant colors and incredibly cheerful patterns. I have no idea what I'm going to do with them -- it's the first time I've ever bought fabric without a plan for how to use the fabric -- and the patterns are a little bolder than my typical style, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to throw caution to the wind just this once and buy something on impulse.

To top it off, I also got a bunch of watercolor-y, wildflower-y fat quarters (had to spend the whole gift certificate, you know!). Again, I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with those fabrics, either, but they were so cheerful, I had to have them. Ellen said she was glad that my taste is so different from hers because she can watch me buy all this outlandish fabric and see what I do with it without having to buy it herself!

I also got a ton of sewing done over the weekend. I now have 6 finished blocks for the Clay's Choice quilt (that's 20% of them!). I decided to stop assembling the quilt 1 block at a time and instead chain-piece the component parts, which will then be used to make the final blocks. Each block is made of 16 squares, which combine into 4 identical quarters. I can sew 16 squares together into 1 block, which takes me nearly an hour, or I can sew a pair of squares together, as many times as I want, which takes as much time or as little time as I have available. The 2 squares combine to make a rectangle, and 2 rectangles combine to make a block quarter. Then, when I have a bunch of the block quarters made, finishing the blocks goes a lot faster.

This weekend, I finished all of the red & tan rectangles (which make up half of the block quarter) and got going on the blue & tan rectangles (the other half of the quarter). Then I'll start pairing the rectangles into block quarters, and from there, it's pretty fast to sew the blocks. I went ahead and finished some blocks yesterday, too, because it's fun to see them finished, even if it is less efficient to do it that way.

I also washed, dried, and ironed a load of the new fabrics in betweeen chain-piecing the Clay's Choice blocks -- all in all, a busy and productive weekend!