White thread, chain piecing, and why I'm making sure all those flowers bloom up

I am a huge fan on contrast stitching but sometimes you have to break out the plain white thread. When your fabrics already include all of the colors, plain white is the contrast. I use Aurifil. Back when I was making my very first machine quilted quilt, it was what the owner of my local quilt shop recommended and that was even before I knew it was the trendy brand of thread to be using.

I don't have a fancy craft room or sewing table. My sewing machine lives on a wooden desk in the corner of my living room. I leave it out all the time. Mainly because I don't have any closet space left to store it. But I do find that leaving it out certainly leads to more sewing than putting it away between uses. Sometimes that desk does get cluttered with other junk piled around my sewing machine but I aspire to make a career out of crafting so I try to hold that space open for doing my crafts.

"Flower-covered sheets should face up, not down, because that’s where the sun would be." Obviously this applies to flower covered quilts so I'm taking the time to make sure every single square "blooms" in the right direction.

This is the first time I'm chain piecing. In the past I've used the thread cutter on the back of my sewing machine to cut my thread between each piece. This time I just keep sewing. Instead of using a couple inches of bobbin thread at the start and end of each piece, I have just about a half an inch to trim. It's faster to chain piece and it doesn't waste nearly as much thread (that Aurifil isn't cheap).

Is buying a 60mm rotary cutter worth it?

Yes!

I originally estimated it would take me a week to cut my thousands of 2.5 inch squares for this quilt top. Reality is it took me just a day short of a month.

What did I learn?

If you're ironing in your galley style kitchen so that the iron can be behind the baby gate, you've got to iron in bulk because you can't use the dishwasher while the ironing board is set up.

The first quarter or so of my fabric I ironed and cut one piece at a time.

The second quarter I ironed and cut three pieces at a time. While Luke was awake. So between each piece of ironing I would peek around the corner and check on him. Sometimes he'd be sitting on a chair looking at a book. Sometimes he'd be climbing on the dining room table trying to eat dog treats. You win some, you lose some.

And then that week I estimated I'd be done in was up and I had to make this more efficient.

I got a 60mm rotary cutter so I could cut more pieces of fabric at a time.

Olfa Deluxe Rotary Cutter (60mm)

$22.68

Buy on Amazon

[affiliate link]

My Google research indicates that a 45mm is good for 6 layers and a 60mm is good for 8 layers, my experience indicates this is correct but your blade better be fresh and sharp.

The latter half of my fabric I ironed all at once and then cut 4 pieces, each folded in half for 8 layers, all at once. And I got it all done in one day, mostly while Luke was taking his afternoon nap.

Squaring up directional prints and a couple cutting errors meant I lost more fabric that I hoped for and got a mere 96 squares out of some prints. My original aim was 100+ squares of each print. This means my finished quilt is going to be about 108 inches by 120 inches versus my originally planned 120 by 120. For comparison sake, a King size quilt from Pottery Barn is 108 x 92. Even losing a 12 inch row, my quilt is still going to have the oversized effect I'm going for.

Next up sewing all those little squares into blocks.

Approximately 3000 2.5" squares of Anna Maria Horner fabric ready to be pieced into a giant postage stamp quilt.

Let the Fabric Cutting Begin

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.

IMG_5760

IMG_5761

IMG_5771

IMG_5773