After moving piles of fabric around for awhile, I've finally settled on an arrangement I like for my blocks. I've narrowed down 48 fabrics to just (just...) 36. I selected the fabrics by stacking them into red/pink, orange, yellow, green/teal, blue, and purple piles and then picking my favorite 6 from each or when I had less than 6 I picked the fabric that was the most of the color I needed from another pile. For example, if you look at the far left fabric in the yellow row, you can see that it could have passed for teal and is probably more teal than yellow but it's yellow-er than most of my other options. Each 12 inch x 12 inch finished quilt block will have one square of each fabric. I'm going to make each block identical but if you wanted to use more or less than 36 fabrics or didn't want to deal with keeping all your cut pieces of fabric in order (which I struggled with immensely on my first few quilts) you could just go for a random arrangement.
After I sorted out my fabrics, I spent the next day cleaning my house. Luke is now 14 months old. He can reach everything. He's figured out how to climb on chairs and from chairs onto tables. I've got a small desk I use as my sewing table. All my essentials like pins, bobbins, and scissors are in the drawer. Everything non-essential for this project is currently in boxes in the garage. I also had to actually put away everything that was living on my kitchen counters because the kitchen is the only downstairs room we can block off with baby gates (other than the half bath) so that's where ironing and cutting is happening.
Today, I started cutting. I'm using a 2.5 inch wide quilting ruler so that makes it very easy to cut 2.5" squares. I iron my fabric and then fold it in half and square it up. Then I cut all of my strips in one direction and without touching the fabric, I rotate my cutting mat 90 degrees and cut all of the strips into squares. I'm scooting each row of cut squares away so I can make sure I get the edge lined up before cutting the next (I found this out the hard way). It shouldn't be difficult to cut through 2 layers of fabric at once, if it is I recommend a new blade on your rotary cutter.
In about 2 hours, I got 8 fabrics cut but my back started hurting so I'm taking a break and will cut more as the week goes on. In total I'm going to need 3600 squares so I don't feel the need to rush it.
