Major Milestone [that will last forever and start to feel impossible and make me question all my life choices] has been met! All of the fabrics are selected for Mary and they have all been cut enough to get going with any block. No, there are not 31K pieces here yet…. while I’ve got it down to a fine science and cutting 1″ squares goes pretty fast, it isn’t exactly fun. I cut enough for all of the colors that appear less than 500 times. Everything else, I cut in increments of 500 when I run low on whatever was already cut.

I made fabric selection so hard. Changed my mind roughly 30 times and have about 10 yards of fabric to add to my stash because of it. The problem is – I’m getting ready to spend 300 hours with this thing. If I’m not sure about or don’t love a bit of it, it will be in my face for days, weeks, and maybe even a year. There’s no take backs and no changing of the mind once go goes…. so it just has to be right. Even if it means I end up with four yards of pink fabric I kind of hate and have no idea what I’ll ever use it for. Anybody into pink? I’ll make you a good deal!

Super exciting moment that leads to ……. A FINISHED BLOCK!

Block #79

The way I approach these is to count out all of the blocks and do a random draw to choose which block I’m going to do. There’s no rhyme or reason to the order of the blocks which means the quilt will reveal itself in its own time. It adds a little mystery for me and prevents avoidance of hard or boring blocks.

Each block is 19×19 squares (the full width of the adhesive stabilizer that holds them while piecing). They start at 1″ and finish just at 1/2″. The block itself doesn’t finish perfectly square due to shrinkage in the stabilizer. I toyed with tinkering with settings or other tricks to accommodate the shrink and get a perfect square, but any tactic there is accident prone and likely to lead to more than one “do over”. It’s safer to allow the shrink and manage the direction so it always shrinks on the horizontal and never the vertical.

This quilt is 175 pixels x 175 pixels and should finish at roughly 87″ x 89″. We’ll see when we get there…. if we get there 😉

Block #69

69, huh huh huh. Got that out of the way early! Also mucked up a block early. I wrote my little Perfection thoughts last night and made my first big error today on my second block. So me. I forgot that the pattern page split leaves one row on a different page than the rest of the block. When the block was one row short, I assumed I counted it wrong when I broke it up and made the block missing the row. I went back and added the row all by itself which means its a bit wonky. Back to that things must stretch and come together in a predictable way to get predictable results. Fortunately, I was able to hide the worst of the mismatch in the blacks so it will just be our secret, ok? 

Perfection is for Perfectionists

I’ll admit, I’ve become a lot better at this. It is a skill and to really get the consistency, you have to practice and sweat the small stuff. Getting the seam allowance just one thread to the left of right can mean up to 1/2″ off for a whole block. I’ve developed a lot of “rules” and repeatable checks to constantly be checking in on my seams and square sizes, but there are some things that I just can’t programmatically control. Some fabrics have a little more stretch than others, sometimes if you have too many seams running in the same direction it creates a “pull” and drags to non-square, sometimes my cuts didn’t stay right on the bias and I get a little stretch, sometimes I don’t and could really use it. Point is…. No block every finishes perfectly and I’ve quit trying. Once there are 31K of these with quilting and crinkles post wash, none of it will matter. I do have tolerance though – if one of them gets too far off or too whompus, then it just has to be redone. I’m so certain that it will happen a large number of times, I go ahead and add 15% to fabric counts for do overs and mistakes. 

It is what it is and that’s all that it is. I’ll love her, imperfections and all. 🙂 

Progress Photo 

not even a little bit overwhelming……