7? Am I really on day 7?
I'd hoped to get a little further today but to be honest, knew I probably wouldn't. My daughter had a friend over to spend the night last night so today's schedule included driving said friend home; then meeting up with some cousins at the planetarium for a show, then all the cousins and my sister coming back to our house for a little XBox Kinect action and dinner. I did a slow-cooker hot beef sandwich thing (with potato chips and baby carrots on the side) so getting dinner for everyone took a grand total of about 20 minutes all in. So no hard work involved, no stress, just most of the day spent with other people. Which is what the holidays are about, after all.
So, all that taken into consideration, the hour and a half I got to work on quilting projects this morning while the girls were sleeping in actually felt like a bonus.
The picture is my current Work In Progress--WIP--or Quilt in Progress--QUIP. I'm doing a wallhanging of my own design for my 10-year-old niece at her request. My design includes a paper-pieced shape on a pieced background of 6" squares. The paper-pieced shape (can you guess what it is from the picture?) is paper-pieced because I want to do 2" strips of fabric throughout.
I had to blow up the image and have it done on a large-format printer at a copy center. Then this morning I taped it to my sewing room window which faces east so it gets great morning light. Perfect lightbox, although I have to reach a little to trace up high. Didn't do a bad job, though. Then I had to figure out how to break the shape down into sections to trace onto the foundation paper--sections that not only fit on the size of foundation paper I was using, but also make sense once I start piecing them.
My next step is to mark the sections with sewing lines for the strips to make sure I get everything to fit the way I imagine it to fit.
Mind you, I've only done paper piecing a couple of times before and always with patterns. And although I tried using EQ7 to do this, my learning curve was far too steep for the time I had. I ended up just using EQ for my math (figuring out the dimensions of the quilt, etc.), and then I'm figuring out the rest as I go.
This will either be the best work I've done so far, or it'll be a hot mess. I alternate between the two thoughts almost by the minute.
Sandy's blog on quilting, life, and sundry.
