Blooming Batik 9 Patch Quilt: April 2007 Archives
So, on Friday, I got to the business of thinking seriously about my Blooming 9 Patch quilt again. I know there are probably faster ways to do this, but I approached it by sewing together all the pieces for one pair of strips (there's symmetry in the strips) and then moving on to the next, starting with the outermost strips and working my way in. I figured this way I could line things up as I went and look for any systematic problems that might be creeping in. It also just turned out to be fun to line up the strips every time I completed a set. The picture only shows how the first 8 pairs would look if I stopped at that point. The first 8 pairs of strips gets you a pretty respectable sized baby quilt/throw. Which goes to show that this design is pretty versatile. But since there are 15 total pairs of strips (and the center pair is actually a trio), I'm not really even halfway done at this point.
The more I work on this project, the more I enjoy watching the colors come together, and the more I like the whole process of piecing a top. Everytime I sit down to sew, I learn something new about my machine or how the process of connecting two pieces of fabric with thread really works. I still have an awful lot to learn, but I can see major improvement from my first project to this one, and that's pretty satisfying to me.
Now... back to my strips!
First off, thank you to everyone who left a comment yesterday. I enjoyed reading every one of them. I'm very touched by how many of you were willing to share your own experiences and the positive energy that many of you shared for John and I and the baby. We feel so lucky right now to get to feel her bounce around (yes, John has felt her too, now) and I hope everyone who commented or just comes by to read who is dealing with pregnancy/fertility related issues has good luck now and in the future.
In the meantime, it's not all about the baby chez Biologist. I have made some more progress on my quilt. All of the 9 patches are complete, and all the additional pieces have been cut out. I couldn't resist pulling out my big piece of black felt and laying them out to see what the whole quilt was starting to look like.
My felt wasn't quite wide enough for me to lay out the whole quilt, so when I got towards the end, I just laid out the pieces for one of the short ends so that I could see how the "bloom" was going to look. It's hard to capture the better part of a queen-sized quilt top on camera and still get any detail, but I think the picture does give you a pretty good impression of what is going to happen. I like that there are some areas that stand out as bright (like the center and the band of reddish fabric towards the edge) and that there are areas that are more muted in between them and at the edge. I think if it were all bright, it would be a little bit overwhelming.
So the next step is to get the pieces sewn together. And this is where I've stopped to pause for a bit. My 9 patch squares are supposed to be 4-1/4 x 4-1/4 inches (this is what the solid squares have been cut to be) but in the direction perpendicular to the seams that were used to connect the pieces for the 9 patches, for many of the squares the dimension seems to be closer to 4-1/8 most of the time (the other side is close enough to 4-1/4 for me not to worry about it). So I'm trying to decide what to do. Do I trim my solid color squares? Do I just center my 9 patches on the solid squares as best I can, since it doesn't really matter how much fabric is taken into the seam as long as the blocks line up correctly?
I'm leaning towards the latter option, but wouldn't mind input from the more experienced in the audience...
