What do you do when your preferred method of basting is basting spray and you realize you’re fresh out, so you need to make an online order and then wait for it to come before you can finish the baby quilt you’ve started?
Why, start another baby quilt, of course.
I believe I mentioned in the last blog post that I’d rediscovered a set of fat quarters in the search for mask materials and decided to make a little playmat for my baby niece, in addition to the quilt I’ve already got in progress for her. “Playmat” just means I didn’t have enough fabric to make an officially-sized baby quilt, so it’s just a small quilt for a baby. A newborn-sized baby quilt, perfect for a little girl who’s just about 6 weeks old now. Playmat just sounds slightly more intentional.
I refreshed my memory as to how to scan fabric into EQ8, chose two blocks from my GoCube AccuQuilt block set for which I had all the dies, and played around with arrangements until I hit on one I really liked. This was the original.
I then looked at the fabric requirements and realized, nope, didn’t have quite enough for that size, especially as I was working with fat quarters, not quarter yards (WOF), which makes figuring the cutting amounts a little different.
So it got a little less square and a little smaller overall. More playmatty. 16 blocks down to 12. I had just enough fabric to make that work.
Which means you know what probably happened next.
I have conference calls every night this week, multiples in a row, so I’ve been taking mornings for myself to balance. I’m finding it relaxing to spend time in my sewing room before work.
Sunday, I found the white fabric in my stash to supplement the fat quarters for the design, and I cut some of the pieces for the Uneven Nine-Patches. Monday morning, I finished the cutting of the Uneven Nine-patches that I’d started on Sunday, and I got the blocks sewn together.
I’m not entirely sure what happened with the tone-on-tone white rectangles.
If you look closely you’ll see some of the rectangles had to get eased in a little bit. I cut them all with the AccuQuilt die. I am pretty sure I double-checked to make sure I was putting the grain in the right direction, but it’s possible something got off. However, I will say it’s a fabric that’s been in my stash for a long while, I have no idea where or when I got it (definitely quilt-quality, though), but it looks like it’s a lower thread count than the other fabrics. Might that have been the issue?
Nevertheless, I persisted.
This morning I was fairly overtired from last night’s Zoom calls, but I was looking forward to getting back to my sewing room. Grabbing my AccuQuilt dies and the posie fabric, I started cutting the 2 1/2” squares.
Or I thought I was.
Turns out, I had grabbed the wrong die. I had looked at it briefly and thought, Yep, squares. Turns out, Nope. Not squares. Two rectangles instead, and narrower than 2 1/2”. By the time I realized my mistake, I had already cut enough of the fat quarter into the wrong size that I couldn’t regroup and fix my mistake. Dang. The posie fabric had been my fave in the design.
Back to EQ8 and my stash. Revision 3 of the design…
The posies are gone replaced by a Valentine’s Day fabric I’ve had in my stash for years (scanned into EQ8 to make sure it would work okay). It had come in a scrap box from…was it Fat Quarter Shop that was doing those for awhile? Are they still doing it?
In any case, it was the only fabric I had that was at all similar in feel to the rest of the fabrics. I don’t love it the way I really loved the posies, but when I cut enough squares so I could selectively use the ones that didn’t have “February 14th” emblazoned in them, and only had all the other lovey-dovey wording, it works. My SIL will probably adore the fact that it has XXOO and “sweetie” and such in it. Who knows? Since she’ll never have seen my original design, she won’t know this is slightly less-than.
And the fabric is now no longer in my stash. Always feels good to use something that’s been languishing, and I’m sure the fabric will have far more fun playing with a baby than sitting on my shelf.
So with that quick switcheroo, I completed cutting the pieces and have started sewing the blocks.
The AccuQuilt really shines when it comes to triangles. Wow, were those flying geese pieces easy to sew together. Loved it.
I will have to pay attention to the directionality of the words in the corner blocks now. I’ll either have to make sure I have them all going in the same direction, or I’ll have to switch them every-which-way so it looks random. Only having a couple going the wrong way will just be annoying.
But that’s a problem for tomorrow morning, when I’m progressively even more tired from evening conference calls. That’s an exciting thought.
Time to start getting ready for my work-day. Happy Zooming to all of you!