New Calculations and Procrastination

After many unsuccessful attempts, I finally have a block for my Irish quilt that works! For the design of the quilt, each block has two dark green sides and two light green sides. When arranged properly, the light sides of four blocks form a cross and the dark sides of four blocks form a cross.

The light sides matching up

The dark sides matching up

The blocks aren't squared up or even very well pressed yet because I was just so excited to finally see a finished cross. I had fun arranging them different ways to try to get an idea for the finished layout. I think the entire quilt will be 36 by 36 blocks. The only thing I'm not loving at the moment is the pinwheel effect the alternating corner triangles are creating.

I just don't want it to distract from the over all effect of the alternating crosses. Hopefully it will be subtle enough to not be to noticeable. So, tomorrow, I plan to make headway on the rest of the blocks and have the top pieced by Friday.

I have a bunch of other projects going at the moment as well. I need to put borders on this wall hanging before I can quilt it.

I know, I know. You all are so jealous of how on top of things I am. I clearly finish projects in time for the holiday they are intended. Or not. Sigh. Oh well. I'm just telling myself I'm really early for next Halloween. I love this pattern. It's from Buttermilk Basin and was really fun to sew. Don't you just love this bat and his button eyes?

 I love Halloween so I don't really mind working on Halloween projects all year round. Do you find yourself making projects that you finish so late that you end up early for next year?

Slow Progress

Have you ever had a quilt that you just can’t make any headway on? I’ve stopped and started on this Irish inspired quilt for over a year and have yet to make a single block. Well, correctly at least. I’ve made lots of screw up blocks. I got the idea for the pattern from an old quilting book I found at a library book sale. It’s called A Year in Patchwork and has a quilt to make for each month, loosely based on the “theme” of each month. 

I love celebrating the changing seasons, so it’s a fun book to browse through. I loved the idea of the March pattern and bought a stack of beautiful green fabric.

The quilt uses a mix of dark and light fabric to create a cross like design in the quilt. Some of the fabrics are shot with metallics which give the composed blocks movement and texture.This was also the first time I had used batiks. I love working with them now. The colors are so rich and saturated and I love the extra weight or heft that the batik printing processes lends to the fabric.

My batiks

My metallic fabrics

 So, with my beautiful fabrics, a seasonal inspiration for the blocks, and a thought to hand quilt the finished piece with a Celtic design, I jumped right into construction. However, the directions are wrong and the center block is about 2 inches to small to correctly fit the pieced border around each block. No big deal if I had made a test block. However, that would have been way to clever of me. When did I realize the mistake? After I had already cut about, ohhhh, 400 triangles or so. Brillant.

My pile of already cut triangles. Too late to fix it now!

So, after a quick consult with my favorite quilt shop owner, I enlarged the center block to 8.5 inches and started over again. At this point, I had already made about 4 different blocks because I originally thought the problem with the sizing was my lame attempts at mitering the corners of each block. So, with a few new fabrics in the mix and my resized block, I’m ready to try it again. Wish me luck!

Progress at last!