Almost done!

I'm sorry I have been a failure of a blog poster. To be fair, my master's thesis is due next Thursday and it takes up a fair bit of time. BUT I have had time to get some quilting done too!

I have been home this week at my parents house. They decided to go off to Florida and needed me to dog sit (I think I would have rather gone with them to Florida...). But since I've been home I have gotten very close to finishing my thesis and I have gotten a lot of work done on two quilts.

The first quilt is a T-shirt quilt for my friend Liz! I'm waiting on permission to put pictures of her t-shirts on my blog so that post will just have to wait.

The second quilt is for my grandmother who recently moved to a nursing home and needs something to spruce her room and put on her lap when she's in her chair. This quilt is turning out much different than I thought it would. In my mind I was thinking "light blue, soft, baby colors, nothing dark or heavy" and that's not entirely what I got...

Its a cheating way of using a 9 block pattern but it makes it a lot easier.

You start out with a 3x3 square. My little blocks were 4 inches by 4 inches (I also didn't sew all of the little pieces together. I did 8x4 inch strips sewed to each other and cut them in half, much faster.

 Once you have your 3x3 squares you just have to cut them into 4ths and you end up with 4 little blocks! My quilt had a total of 56 little blocks that made up a 41 inch x 46 inch quilt (once I put the border on).

This is one of the 3x3 blocks that has been cut up and each piece was twisted and moved around. You end up with a pin-wheel in the center that I originally thought was the center or each block, but its actually really hard to find the pinwheels when the whole quilt is together.

I really like to see how its coming together and am typically not patient enough to finish each step before going onto the next. So I made a few of the blocks just to see how it would look. For this quilt this was actually really helpful. It let me think about which colors I wanted to draw out and which I wanted to keep under control (for example, I didn't really like the big green squares and I already had quite a few of them). This informed how I put together the 3x3 squares so I could have a nice color balance.

NOTE: These pieces are not yet sewn together, just lain on the table

I'm really happy with how it has come together. It is not the light, soft, pastel quilt I had been planning for and it kind of reminds me of legos, but I like it nonetheless. I was SHOCKED that I was able to get every single piece in a place where no two same color pieces touched (this is not the case in the picture- the bottom right corner failed, two yellows and two salmons touch- but I was able to do some rearranging and fix it). I have no idea how I managed this, I really didn't think it would be possible, shear luck.

So I need to sew each of the squares together, add a light blue border, back and binding. I'm really excited about the binding. I'm doing something I saw on a quilting blog I read. You take your scraps (in this case I bought extra fabric for each of the colors) and sew them into your binding. I'm a bit nervous about it because I absolutely hate binding and am kind of bad at it and I have a feeling if I screw it up with pretty binding then it will really show badly... but its worth a try!