Monday Morning Check-In

Morning all!

Just checking in on a bit of this and bit of that . . . I've been plugging away on my #xplusalong blocks. I'm up to 23 now!!

As good as I was feeling about knocking off 23 of these suckers, I then started thinking about how many of them I needed for a queen-sized quilt. And then I started thinking about the fact that these are only 7 inch blocks. Sigh. All of a sudden, 23 didn't seem like very many blocks!! This is a case in which I started out so totally enamored of the block itself that I didn't think with the end in mind, and so didn't adjust the block size to better fit the quilt size. Big woops!

Fortunately, I'm planning on inserting a 6 inch border and 2 or 2.5 inch strips in between the blocks. That'll bring me down to about 8x10 rows, so 23 blocks down and 57 blocks left to go!! Sigh. Actually, they do go fairly quickly. The cutting is actually the most laborious part, and that was slower at first because I was still picking out my fabric as I was going!

Actually, the time I spend putting these blocks together will give me some thinking time to consider how to quilt this monster. This will be the largest quilt I have made to date (my pieced scrap border quilt is only 64x64), and since I find it such a wrestling match to quilt in the narrow throat of my darling Brother machine, I usually just do straight-line quilting for larger quilts even though I'm getting much more daring with my free-motiong quilting these days on smaller quilts. My kingdom for a machine with a larger throat!!

Anyway, here's a shot of one of my favorite fabric combinations so far:

It kind of reminds me of Florida. The turquoise is from Lotta Jansdotter's collection, which I just love!

In other news, April had texted me with news of a great sale on batting, which I couldn't turn up, so I headed over to Joan's to see what I could get. Unfortunately, the sale was apparently over and the batting was back up to $280 (insert unhappy face here!). Happily and most amazingly, I found the most totally amazing sales lady at Joann's who gave me a manager's discount and sold me the batting (which was not on sale) at half off! Just to give you a sense of how much I got, 90 inches, by 25 yards, I included a photo to scale next to my sweet (and very large) 85 lb pup Sophie. Yes, it's that big! For ALL those times that Joann's has refused to give me credit for the coupons I've left at home, I TOTALLY forgive you!! Thank you Joann's!!

No Sophie does not seem so excited about participating in this photo shoot! I think she's afraid that this very large tower of fabric is going to fall on her!

Finally, I've at last finished my Twisted blocks! I now just need to piece them together (thankfully the easiest part of the whole process!) and quilt and bind! Yay!