Quiltish Day

After suffering from a funk yesterday and a lack of desire to quilt (actually cut, I had nothing cut out), I started late in the day .. I wanted to make blocks for the scrappy swap .. I noticed that with me cutting right on the line, my blocks were coming in around 12 ¹/4" and that just wasn't good enough for a swap . home use - sure .. but not a swap .. these ladies are expecting my best and accurate work and they deserve to get it. what's a few more orphan blocks .. it's not like I'll never not have them LOL. What I did was have my lines just on the fabric side of the marks and cut from there .. that took care of the problem . it was like ¹/16th", but it was enough over several seams to make a difference .. what made me think of this was during a discussion on scant seams, that came up as a method for dealing HST - so I thought - why not .. i can't send the blocks like this .. tried it and worked .. I was having my marks right at the edge of the fabric .. and they were coming up short ..

I did do 4 blocks today .. 2 will be sent and 2 will stay here .. I grabbed some patterns off mccallsquilting.com for these blocks and they turned out perfectly .. I'm tickled pink (heh) and red with how well they look! I can't post images as we've all agreed to be surprised by what shows up in the mail .. makes it more exciting that way.

I went out and got the wood trim to try Sharon's Schamber's hand basting technique. I'm pretty tired today and I'm not sure I have the energy to do this right now, but there is always tomorrow. I'm looking forward to trying this and can't wait to start .. will have to be done at my kitchen table as it is wide enough to accommodate these 8' lengths of wood trim :O

Update on my kitty quilt

I had to add another piece of flannel to my design wall as with 2 projects going, i was constantly take blocks off and on .. as I put it up there I realized that my kitty quilt might be bigger than planned. I didn't take into a account the printing size difference on a mac with pc designed templates and pp patterns. bah .. I used to be able to do that conversion in my head without thinking about it - now i have to constantly remind myself to remember it and I forget (@@). This quilt isn't designed on the traditional format so I do have a lot of flexibility - I didn't jam all the blocks next to each other as I wanted an illusion of floating kitties and would fill the spaces with yard, mice, spools, milk jugs, and blank spaces. I was just picking and choosing whatever block appealed to me .. my top row is shy 2 blocks, both out of the Cat's Meow pattern book so I'll do those next, then do all the patterns from the internet. That should give me a better idea how much room I am going to have to play with. Also what might work in my favour is the fact that there is a set of 3 blocks (12x12) that I'm not going to use now; that will likely balance the space I'm losing - paws crossed