The Current Quilt

The quilt I am working on and making actual progress with (in addition to the Buck a Block quilt) is a thrown together, cheapo-fabric-from-Wal-mart quilt. My MIL/quilting mentor showed me a pattern for a quilt that is made from 8 different fat quarters and is all squares with a scalloped border. It sounded like a good practice quilt. I thought I could handle the square part. 8 fat quarters sounded reasonable financially. The border, well, I would just have to do something else this time around. Scallops are beyond me at this point.

I made mental notes of the size to cut the squares, how many per row and how many rows. I found 8 FQs for $9.97 at Wally's and got busy. (FYI - 8 FQs at my favorite quilt shop would be around $20.00.)

Things I have learned from this quilt so far:

1. No matter how straight I think I cut or sew, ALL the rows will never line up exactly. I think next time I may stagger them. I like that look.
   
2. Stacking the squares for each row and sewing them in order worked much better than sewing 2, then getting 2 more and sewing them together, then sewing those 4 and so on. I kept mixing up the order and then getting annoyed when two of the same fabric ended up next to each other. (I may have a little ocd.) :)
   
3. Keeping a pin in the first square of each row kept me organized as I sewed squares into rows.
4. Printing numbers and pinning them to the rows kept the rows straight and kept me from tearing my hair out when I was sewing rows together.
5. Cut your border fabric in the direction as the selvage. Otherwise you get stretchy borders.
6. Sewing rows with a little scrap fabric leader saves time and thread.
7. Measure each side individually and cut a border for just that side.
8. Pin the border to the quilt from the center of the border out to the ends to make sure your border goes all the way to the end.

I am pretty happy with how this quilt is turning out. When I finished the rows, it was quite small. I went back to Wally's to see what they had in the way of yardage for borders. They had 2 choices of packages of 2 yards, one of each of two fabrics. One was the yellow fabric (my least favorite) paired with the pink (my favorite). The other was the brown with the colored flowers (nice) and the turquoise and brown (also nice, just not the pink that I wanted.) So I went with the lesser of two evils so to speak and went with the brown and turquoise. I also got some white on white to break up the craziness that was sure to happen. I mapped out my quilt in Photoshop then started cutting borders. I got 2 out of 4 borders done Monday night.

Here are the two stages I have pictures of.


Stage one, just blocks.



Stage 2 , blocks and 2 borders. (This was taken by a 5 year old, so excuse the extreme left view.)

If you have read this far, this quilt needs a name. Help me out!