Running Circles

That's how I feel lately, like I'm running circles all over the place! I haven't had much time for quilting, which involves many circles as I pebble quilt my quilting bee quilt, however I am excited to announce a new quilt in the works! 

My coworker is expecting a new baby at the end of the year (which means an upcoming baby quilt) and she has asked me to make her son the quilt for his new twin sized bed! We've had many brainstorming sessions and I've spent many evenings sketching plans for the fabric she wanted to use. Finally a quilt layout was chosen, calculations were made and she ordered the fabric, which arrived today! Tomorrow I get to go pick out some coordinating prints to go with it for a special paper pieced train panel, there is a transportation theme because this 21 month old loves "Cho-CHOOOOs!" I am so excited, this is my first BIG TIME quilt project. :)

I promised to get it done before Lee and I head to Hawaii next month, which is when they plan to re-decorate his bedroom/the baby's room. All this will be done while we work on mudding and painting our new basement bathroom, plus I am organizing Lincoln's second annual Bark For Life which is next weekend. All these things on my to-do list are making me want to go for a run to handle the stress of it all. At least my half marathon I've been training for all summer is over, I did not do so well! Needless to say blogging may not get done for a while, sorry friends.

Making Some Progress

I haven't been quilting much lately, which is why I haven't been posting either. I really haven't made a lot of progress on my mom's quilt either.... So rather than study right now I am going to quilt at least two rows for my mom's "Yellow Brick Road" quilt. The quilt is going to be like the one mentioned in this post, using Wizard of Oz fabric, one of my mom's favorite movies. Here has been my method so far.

I start with my 4.5" by 7" block. Then I trim it down from there to make it wonky, or I leave it alone and cut it wonky later. I attach 1" strips to the sides, some only on a few of the sides (see below.)

Then I trim them down to 5" by 7.5" with the white boarder grout around them, this is where I make them really wonky.

Then I stitch them together to form a row of 8 or 9. The rows with only 8 I will go back and add on 1/2 a block to each side to make them the same length once I finish all the rows.

Now I tried a different method on my fourth row, to see if it saved time and fabric. I added white to only three sides, thinking I would make one side larger to make up for both sides of the grout not being added. (So I did the top and bottom and right side of each block, making the right side wider than 1"). It did not save any time, it actually took up more time because I wasn't able to make them wonky the easy way, way too much fussy cutting. And the blocks were smaller than 7.5" making this row shorter than I anticipated.

The row closest to the bottom is the experimental row.

So here is what I have done so far:

Not a whole lot! And I need 14 rows of 9 blocks each, pieced, basted, quilted and binded by Mother's Day! I am not sure if I want to leave the experimental row or add on fabric to all sides. I kind of like the idea of having an odd row in the quilt. I think I will leave it until I get the other 10 rows finished. Let's hope I can get a few rows done before studying for my final, and watching Glee. :)