Saturday, February 12, 2011

Batik Around the World

I had a full day of sewing yesterday. Snowed in, A holiday. Tetsu was off enjoying the day himself so I spent the whole day matching seams and chatting with Leiya. Yes, we were both on the computer at the same time but I wanted to sew so I took the computer upstairs, turned on chat and Leiya watched me sew (and I got to watch her fall asleep... it was 2:00 am her time.)

I finished the smaller blocks for the Around the World Batik. I should have realized that they were going to turn out a shade smaller than the other blocks because of all the seams but I didn't discover that until I was done. They have to have a bit of pulling to match up but so far so good.

These are the firery orange-pink blocks up on the wall in no particular pattern.

Then I worked on medium sized pale blocks. You should have heard me reciting the alphabet as I worked on all these. 26 alphabet coded colors. It was a good thing I had put away all the batiks in the right order because for the life of me I couldn't remember which color was assigned to what letter... I know I could have MARKED them but I'm not that organized and I enjoy frustrating myself.

"A, B, C, D, E, F, G~~~♪♪♪~"

The pale blocks got made and up on the wall.

Chatting with Leiya confused me more as I sewed wrong blocks to wrong sides. (And I had already put in so many hours my eyes were blurring...) However, by the end of the afternoon I had a quarter of the quilt made. THAT is what THIS is. A quarter done. I'll be hoping for another day of sewing so that I can finish the other three quarters.

At that point I'll need to make a decision about hand quilting or machine quilting. If I'm going to hand quilt this then I'll just put it all together, mark it and get it ready for quilting. If I'm going to machine quilt this I'll leave all this in quarters and do the more manageable size in my domestic sewing machine. I have more confidence in my hand quilting abilities but the speed of machine quilting is tempting...

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