3 days in the Quilt Lab

It was a lovely 3 day weekend at my house filled with all kinds of sewing and quilting.

Friday was spent watching DVDs and finishing the tree skirt. It doesn't quite lay flat so I'm going to go at it with some starch and a steam iron before I sandwich this coming weekend.

Saturday was mostly about making progress on Bonnie's Mackinac design.

First I finished 50 of 120 tri-recs. They still need to be sliver trimmed but I think they are pretty close. You can see from the note card that I decided how many blocks I wanted in the finished quilt and then counted out how many "parts" I needed so that the process was more like one of Bonnie's mystery quilts: I needed 30 square in squares, 120 tri-recs, 480 HSTs.

My assistant had to be bribed with a chair next to my chair so I could sit at the sewing machine.

Next up was 30 square in square blocks. Had I re-read the directions properly I would have gotten them done faster AND I could have used the fabric strips I had set aside for this project a month ago.

I cut the center square 1/4" too big but didn't realize until after I had 2 opposite triangles sewn on and the dog ears trimmed. I un-stitched one triangle and trimmed down 3 sides of the center then put the triangles back on. But then they also had to be trimmed down to the right finished size. There was a lot of trimming down, partly my fault but partly the design of the block. Life would have been easier if I had been able to find that out-of-production square in a square ruler that Bonnie used...I'm still looking!

Eventually they were all done!
Now all that's left is 155 more HST that will be sewn into "4patches". The strips are cut so I just need to cut them with the easy angle and start sewing.

The sewing included making a tie for my nephew's birthday last weekend. I think he liked it but it was hard to be excited about a tie when the Easter Bunny had gifted huge baskets of toys and candy.

Finally needing some more handwork for TV time, I pulled out Mickey's on the road project to work on adding sashing to some of the finished rosettes. It's monotonous work but needs to be done so I can lay it all out and figure out how many more rosettes to make during my upcoming conferences and camping trip.

And with that the weekend was over. Is it naptime yet?