Planning ahead.

I know it was wildly optimistic of me but today I went into Spotlight to buy some more fabrics for the back of the new quilt, which I'm realising more and more (as I blog about it) desperately needs a name. Maybe Offset. I like that.

So yeah, today I went and bought some more fabrics for the back of the Offset quilt. I'd already bought 1.2m of a green floral, and kept a 10x40cm piece of all the front fabrics, but I wanted some brighter fabrics too. And I had to get them now, because I didn't want to get home and find I had the urge, but not the materials to follow through.

The bottom green is the print I have lots of, and I got 20cm of each of the others (and a fat quarter of the yellow because they were out of yardage). The maroony print is the same as the green, the blue fabric with the little flowers* is on the other side too, and the peach with the flowers is from a totally different range but it goes quite nicely. The other green is what I've chosen (so far) for the binding - I may go with something brighter in the end.

Since the urge didn't strike tonight I've still got to work out what I even want to do with the back - I need to start by measuring the front but I can't find any of the 43 million tape measures I own.

Oh, just realised, math. 37.5 (block width), a² + b² = c² (53.033), quilt is 3 point-set blocks long and 2.5 point-set blocks wide, quilt measures approx 159x132cm. Yay for math! It's easier than getting up and finding a tape measure...

Obviously, this is a really really horrible rendering, but maybe something like this.

It will not, thankfully, look anything like that drawing.


*I get really really bad deja vu every time I look at this fabric. I am so, so sure I have seen it, or something really really really similar before. It's driving me a little bonkers.

Awww, pretty.

This social life thing sure gets in the way of blogging. Buuut... I did manage to squish 5 minutes out of my busy schedule* to iron and photograph the new quilt top properly - sans borders, since I'm still not sure about them.

The better photo was one in the shade anyway - the wind put dark shadows in all the sunlit (at a severe 4.30pm angle) ones.

 

But I couldn't help but take some artsy lit-from-behind ones too.

Anyway, the sky to the east is starting to lighten, so it's probably bedtime.


*Okay, so I sat on the couch for 3 hours watching Bring It On: All or Nothing, ironed it in the last 15 minutes of the movie and barely scraped in the last bit of sunlight hitting the clothesline. Honestly, the sheer volume of adverts that the digital channels put in their midday movies is staggering - I probably could have downloaded it and watched it in it's entirety in less time than it took to watch it on the telly. The social bit came after, and meant I didn't get home till 6am.

I don't know...

I don't know why, but when I get to the point where a quilt is in four or five quite large pieces, I loose all motivation to finish it off. I don't know if it's because of all the pinning, or the difficulties involved in having a small ironing board and a large quilt, or what it is. I tried distracting myself by doing some maths for a revised gym bag but it didn't work. With maybe 20 minutes of sewing to go, I have given up for the night.

Good thing I have tomorrow off.

Woohoo!

It's not finished, but the blocks are. And so long as the blocks are finished, I can plop them all out on the floor to get an idea of how it will look.

I need to actually put some effort into where each colour goes, I kinda just plopped these wherever. But it's nice to remember that at the end of all these seams will, eventually, one day, be a quilt.

I split my border seams even though it makes for a small but very thick lump. I just feel better about it. It took me an hour and a half to get them all done, pushed way back by the fact that Anna and I went to maccas after work and didn't leave till 12.30. Still, it gave me my facebook status for the evening: I wish "steam the shit out of it" was the solution to all of life's problems, instead of just the ones related to quilting.  

So what if I can't fix everyone's problems. I can press a damn good seam, and for tonight, that just might be enough.

BIG plans.

It's interesting the series of emotions that can happen in an hour or so's progress on a quilt. After I split my HST units last night and ironed out the 112 I need for the big quilt, I thought that it didn't take me that long to iron them out, and it wasn't that bad. I was feeling optimistic that progress would maybe take twice as long as a usual quilt, and it should be a finished top in maybe 2 weeks. Tonight I looked at the little tiny pile of ironed squares and thought it was nowhere near big enough, and I looked at all the ones that have been put aside unironed for the smaller quilt, and I think, holy cow there's a lot there. So I worry, have I done my maths right, that seemed too easy, and shouldn't I have used more of them? There's too many left over. But I did do it right - there's one and a half times as many leftover ones as used ones but it seems like a lot more.

And then I got to cutting the slightly bigger ones. And seven strips being cut into 8 squares each took almost no time at all. Okay, it took over an hour. But it didn't feel like it. Cutting the big white bit into the same number of triangles probably took less time, but it felt like more. And now that they're all cut, and in a neat little pile, it looks as if there's a million billion of them and it will take me the rest of my life.

So I may as well wait till tomorrow to get started. That feeling I think is a mix between despondency and apathy. I anticipate it getting worse tomorrow as I sew them together, disappearing tomorrow night as I hit the town for town-hitting-practice with people from work, returning on the tails of a slight hangover, easing (hopefully) once I've pressed them all (assuming it goes as quickly and effortlessly as list night's 112) and drowning in a sea of alcopops as we properly get into town hitting on the Saturday night.

We have accepted the challenge laid down by mankini man. We are gunna back it up, two nights in a row, Woolies style. We may end up making a scene at Coles*

Expect a return to the nights of drunken rambly posts.

*for the non Australians, Coles are the rival supermarket. I plan on stealing their cardboard cutout of Curtis Stone so that we'll have a breeding pair with our cardboard cutout of Margaret Fulton.

Confused, but not concerned.

So it would seem that, judging by the competition being run on Red Pepper Quilts, the fabrics that I'm using aren't actually the Australian ones. The green colourway is one of the Joann's ones, so I'm curious as to how I have ended up with it.

I'm glad it was what was at my store though. With the exception of one of the yellows, which I wouldn't have really been able to piece into a quilt all on it's own, I wasn't a huge fan of many of the other colours. Bit serendipitous that. As was my ability to spell serendipitous right first go. I don't think I've ever typed that word before, but maybe I'm just that much more awesome than I even realised.

Work tonight was typically quiet for a Tuesday that was freezing cold (well, about 4°C) and bucketing down with rain, so I got all my math done properly for my design revision. I need 13cm more of each print - thankfully Spotlight cuts in 5cm increments - and enough white to go with it. My big pinwheels will come out to 19cm and my little ones were always going to be 13cm - now they'll have 3cm borders instead of 5cm sashing. I'll have to make 112 more HST units but I should also be able to get away with - for now - only pressing and pinwheeling 112 of the little ones too. And all those other ones I've already cut and sewn - well, I'm going to make the original one anyway, just a bit smaller. 113x131cm is still bigger than many of the quilts I've made so far, so I'm thinking of this as my two for the price of one plan. Well, admittedly I keep going back and getting a little more of this or that, so it will no doubt be two for the price of two, but oh well. One of these days, when I get up the motivation to do more than just maths, it's gunna look awesome.

Um...

It took me almost four hours to pair up the 280 half square triangle units. I am not looking forward to having to press them. Might have to do it over a few nights. *shudder*

What's more, I'm considering changing the design. I really really like the look of the brown one with the smaller and larger pinwheels. I was just going to sash it but that's quite dull. 2.5cm extra in the initial square size still makes it 5cm bigger in the pinwheel - for all that lots is lost to seam allowances in pinwheels, it's a fixed 5cm over the initial double width squares, even though my brain feels like it should be a scaled increase. So all I'd need to do is buy 15cm cuts of each of the prints and the same again in the white and I could replace half the blocks - I'd still finish up the pinwheels I've started - half would go in and the other half I could put on the back. Yes, technically, it would increase the amount of pinwheels I'd need to make by a half, but whatever.

Maybe I'm talking myself into just doing more work. But I figure, I'm going to be putting in a huge amount of work anyway. By a fair way, this quilt has the smallest pieces I've done so far, the most points and the most complicated piecing I've ever done. I don't want to have put in a huge amount of effort and get to the end and think to myself, well, that's a bit boring. I could have made that plenty more interesting. I don't even like sashing. I think it's too traditional for my tastes, and I'd really only chosen it because it meant I wouldn't have to match up the corner points. But it wasn't that hard to do the brown quilt.

I could come to regret it, trying to piece dozens of uncooperative pinwheel corners together, or I could end up regretting not doing it, and putting my most labour intensive quilt yet into a box because I'm not totally keen on it. I'm not sure which just yet.

Course, I may get a quarter of the way through ironing my HSTs, realise I still have over 200 to go, and fake my own death. That is always an option.