Dan's Ramblings

Dan here, Tuesday night. Cold outside today. Spent most of the day raking leaves out of the pond and off the beach. Very tiring project. 21 wheel barrow loads of leaves and I don’t even own a tree or use the beach! Did not finish but I do see the light at the end of the tunnel. That is, unless I wake up tomorrow and find it full again. 

I just looked out the window with my high-power flashlight and it appears that the wind is piling up a new assortment of leaves for me to remove. So I guess I will have more to rake out again tomorrow. The end has got to be coming, there does not look like many leaves are still in the trees.

#20 continues to make progress. I have managed to get all 35 blocks complete. YES, I had enough of the background spider web fabric. Not by much, it is a piece about 5” by WOF and another piece of a 2-1/2” strip.

I had faith and made it by the skin of my teeth. I have no idea what that means. Is it referring to my gums or the skin-like feeling when you need to brush your teeth? Carol and I talk about stupid sayings that have no apparent meanings. Quick as Billy be damned is another, there are a lot of them. Don’t get me started. Throw one back at me if you grew up hearing one.

Now to the sashing strips. I pondered them a lot as I finished up the blocks. I had blocks laid out on the floor and kept laying out different fabrics to go with the accent fabric I wanted to use. 

What I had in mind during most of the block construction process, was to use the Corner Pop III and put a narrow long triangle as star points on the sashing strip with the focus fabric as a Square2 unit for corner stones.

Good idea in my head, at least at first. Alas, the idea was scrapped. As busy as the blocks are, I thought my focus fabric would be wasted placed beside the scrappy blocks. So I moved on to plan B.

I decided I still wanted a 3” wide sashing strip. My blocks are 10” finished, so that means I needed a 3”x10” finished strip with enough interest to go with a Square2 unit and be an eye catcher to pull your eyes from all the scraps.

My first thought was to put a flying goose on each end of the strip. Two 1-1/2” x 3” finished flying geese leaves me with a 7” piece of fabric between the two geese. I’m sorry but a 3” x 7” piece is a huge piece of fabric for the middle of the quilt, at least one of my scrap quilts. Especially when you compare that to the scale of the rest of the quilt so far.

I then thought of using a Diamond Rect unit. If I used a 3” x 6” Diamond Rect unit I could put a half inch of the background on each end and turn the 6” unit into the needed 7” piece. (have I lost everyone yet?). Then I thought if I oversized the triangles around the diamond I would have enough fabric left to be able to trim the unit to 7” finished and eliminate the two seams I would have obtained by adding the two half inch fillers. Tried one with scrap and it worked. Was a pain to trim, but I figured out what I needed to do and knew it was easily replicated.

Now to do the math on fabric usage. I only have one yard of the focus fabric. The focus fabric is something that I picked up somewhere in our travels and I liked it and held onto it to use someday, somewhere special. The fabric that became the fussy cut centers in many of the blocks was another of those fabric scores. You all know those fabrics, those that when you saw it you had to have some, then in reality you did not get enough to actually make something with, so it sits in a bin with others like it, patiently waiting to be used. In this quilt I am using two of them. Yay me!

The math said that if I used my focus fabric for the diamonds, the center square in the Square2 units, and the wings of the flying geese I would need 35-1/2” of focus fabric. Nope, remember, I only have one yard of the fabric, not going to work. Now what? I needed to backup and think a little. Another saying I heard as a child ~ you need to back up then go ahead or for you golfers I needed to pull a Mulligan. That saying at least made some sense.

I liked the concept for the quilt, I liked the effect I was going to get with the geese and the diamond units. The easiest remedy was to go back to the fussy cut butterfly and dragonflies and use that as my cornerstones. I am planning on using that same butterfly fabric as the border so it will tie it all together.

Now I only need 31” of my focus fabric. I just need to pay attention because there is very little extra after squaring etc. of the fabric. NO MISTAKES. We’ll see how that goes. Already made a mistake cutting, but fortunately it was with the sashing strip background, I think I have more than enough of that fabric.

So with a plan in effect, off I went assembling the sashing strips and corner stone units to accent the quilt blocks I already finished.

That folks is one of the ways I design as I go making things work, pulling from my experience and imagination. We will see how it looks in reality as I am well on the way. I think you can see where I am going from this initial layout. 

I think it is going to look just fine. Remember this quilt started from a bunch of V-block side triangles left overs (the black and the gold) that I trimmed down to start the block patten.

Hope you enjoyed my process, let me know what you think. It won’t change much but comments make it interesting. Still looking for a better name than #20. Maybe something will come to me after the top is together.

Enjoy your week. Remember, where ever you go, there you are, if I’m supposed to meet you there and you get there first, draw a blue line where we planned to meet. If I get there first, I’ll rub it out.