Stages of a Quilt:

See pattern.

Stalk fabrics.

Buy fabrics.

Debate on how fabrics look together.

Stalk more fabric.

Decide that first fabric was right, stash additional fabric purchse.

Hope husband doesn't notice.

Cut fabric.

Cut MORE fabric.

Realize that if you'd been doing this on the table instead of on the floor, your back probably wouldn't hurt as much.

Curse softly.

Sew first blocks together.

Take dorky picture of first blocks.

Sew LOTS of blocks together.

Attempt to lay them out in a pleasing pattern.

Spend two hours trying to lay them out in a way that doesn't make your eyes cross.

Give up and just sew them together willy nilly, because really, all of those patterns together isn't going to just magically look soothing.

Decide that's how you wanted it to look in the first place, dammit.

Sew together backing.

Let someone convince you that you can machine quilt it on your own machine.

Start quilting.

Think mean thoughts about overly-ambitious quilty friend.

Finish quilting.

Realize that you don't have enough of any one fabric to bind it.

Decide that since it's already such an eye test, you might as well bind it with random scraps you have left over.

Cut strips from scraps.

Sew into binding.

Attempt to lay quilt down in living room to pin binding down for sewing.

Quickly jump out of the way when your husband screams because you are blocking the TV during one of the biggest games of the year.

Sew binding onto quilt.

Flip and handstitch to backing.

And handstitch.

And handstitch.

And handstitch.

Finish handstitching.

Take pictures.

Bask in glory.

That's the completed quilt top - it actually went together much easier than it looked like it would, and it looks pretty good, if I do say so myself. However, I learned these things about myself while sewing it:

• I love my rotary cutter. Seriously. I'm not sure that I'll ever use scissors on anything ever again - ANYTHING. I was considering cutting my chicken with it the other night at dinner.
• What I thought was a quarter-inch seam? Not a quarter inch seam. Each of my blocks was supposed to be 12 x 12, but they ended up 3/4 of an inch shorter on almost all sides. After squaring them, they ended up 11 x 11.
  
• Patterns that coordinate don't always look fabulous when placed together in a block - solids or a vaguely patterned fabric would have done much better than the weirdness in some of the blocks. 
  

Overall, though, I'm pleased with the result, and for a first cutting and peicing exercise, I think I did damn well. Tomorrow, I'm going to pick out the backing fabric and get the quilting pins put in so I can give maching quilting a shot.

I have been killing my back for the past few nights, but dammit, I got all of the peices cut out for that quilt.

I've had this grid board for a long time, and I apparently bought a rotary cutter at some point, because I found that little beauty just waiting for me in my sewing box when I opened it up last week. I guess I've been subconciously wanting to sew and make a full quilt for some time; it took a complete knitting burnout to turn me towards it. 

At heart, I'm a knitter. It's my go-to craft; socks, lace, scarves, whatever is handy and easy to cast on with. I love the varieties of yarn, the different textures and colors and the amazing independant dyer movement that is going on drives me crazy with variety (hence, I have a yarn stash of ridiculous proportions). But occasionally, I get bored with it. I need to put it down and try my hand at something new. And I'm pretty sure that it's the Knitting Olympics that did it to me this time; knitting an entire sweater in a span of two weeks can make you cross eyed. In walks quilting, with the gorgeous fabrics and it's promise of easy projects, and I'm hooked. But we'll see how I feel after I've sewn together thirty log cabin squares and then put those squares all together in some sort of a pattern. I've only got two of the squares together so far, but I think they'll go faster now that I have a clue as to what I am doing. 

ETA: All right. Pictures taken.

Remember that fabric I showed you a few weeks ago? Look at what it has become:

 

The second one is a bit blurry, but we've been overcast for the past few days. I'll get a better picture when I get a chance. But the big point here is that during the making of these quilts, no one died, or threw a hissy fit, and no sewing machines were damaged or pitched off the roof of our house. I think that the machine and I actually came to an agreement on how to work together. And! The walking foot! I ordered the right one, attached it properly, and used it. 

I am a genius.

The hardest part of the whole thing was getting the entire quilt through the machine on the longest passes; you think it is no big deal, but then you try wrestling with five feet of batting and fabric through a machine while you're trying to steer it down a rather narrow line, and then get back to me. We'll chat. I took breaks during the quilting and managed to knock out four squares for a baby blanket, knit in good ol' boring stockingette, but they are finished and blocking as I type this and will be mailed off next week. I'm on a freakin' roll, y'all.  Up next: I'm tackling the Forest Path Stole, which I'm currently up to the second tier on, and pushing through the cross stitch stocking that will end up being my daughter's for Christmas. And somewhere in there I'll manage to go to school, work, and take care of my family. When I can fit it in.

I've got a love/hate relationship with my sewing machine: I love to use it, and it loves to turn out projects that look like a fourth grader was set loose with crazy glue and a doobie. I rarely am successful, in other words, with my sewing projects. However, a while back, I was able to make curtains for my kitchen:

And ever since then, I've been itching to do something fun. While I'm supposed to be working on my Ravelympics project (and I am! I promise!), my attention has been snagged by something else.

I intend for those fabric combinations to become extremely simple quilts for my kids; the University of Texas for my son, and the blue/brown combination for my daughter. And by simple, I literally mean that I'm going to cut a 60" x 45" panel from each bolt, slap some quilting batting between them, and then quilt diagonal lines across them in a contrasting thread color. Then, I'll use the solid colors to attempt to bind the quilts. On the surface, this seems like it will be easy, but just like anything else - I know better. I'm sure I'll learn a lot, and the kids will end up with useable blankets at the end of it, and the sewing bug will be out of my system for a while. 

But first: finishing up the sweater. I'm 18 repeats down the body, and only two skeins of yarn down so far. I'm think that I will need somewhere around 25 repeats to make it as long as I want it to be, and I've also got the arms to do, so I could possibly break into the fourth skein to finish this thing. But it looks like I'm on target to finish on the deadline!