Stitching in the Barn

One of my favorite sewing You Tube channels is The Stitch TV . One of the hosts, Pam, is someone I admire. She's an engineer and a quilter, something I'm aiming to achieve within the next couple of years. She is no nonsense and just unapologetically herself. One piece of advice, or more accurately tag phrase, she gives, I embraced recently: "Babies don't care." That simple phrase freed me from worrying over making the perfect baby quilts. It allowed me to feel free to try new techniques and fudge some trouble spots I came across while making a quilt for my 2.5 year old nephew. I'll post the completed quilt in another post, I still need to get some good pictures, but I'd like to describe some of the things I've done to this quilt.

I couldn't get the quilt out of my mind & sketched this up earlier today on Inkscape Then I took a 2 hour nap. The day can be long when you wake up at 2:30 am to go to work. Everyone went to bed around 10 pm because they were feeling sick so I stayed up to sew and got this done Now its after almost 2 am & I'm going to pay for it tomorrow. Its a 6.5 inch 54-40 or Fight block. I decided to start with two extremely bright colors on a mini quilt and couldn't wait to get a block done. Now I'm too tired to continue. Plus, I made a mistake in my math and cut the strips for the 4-patches 2.5 inches instead of 1.5 inches & wasted a bit of fabric, which irks me so I'm off to get some sleep.

I'm so busy with sewing and back to school. I also feel like I can't get enough sleep. The other day I felt like I barely made it back from the grocery store and everyday at work I get worn out earlier than usual. I just keep saying "School starts Tuesday" then I'll be able to collapse without anyone home during the day, or stay up and sew ^_^ My week started out with my mini quilt. I got all the blocks pieced and played around with the setting. I thought I took pictures of different setting but I guess i didn't. The blocks: They are about 3.75 inches square. The last seams went together so fast I was surprised to see it finished. I now see why a lot of mini quilt makers sew a 1/4 inch seam and then trim it to 1/8 inch. My 1/8 inch seams were a bit inconsistent and I had to back a few with interfacing because the fabric was unraveling weird and I didn't want to get a hole. But I'm happy with these.

I used Inkscape to make a layout for my BOM quilt: I really liked this one! Maybe I need to make a mini mock up to test out how it looks. (crossposted to my LJ)