Sweet Blocks - Cut and Ready

The cutting process for Sweet Blocks took WAY longer than expected.  With some unplanned end of the week activities, a busy weekend, and a couple of cranky kids it was near impossible this week to finish the cutting for this next quilt.  Thankfully by Sunday night I finally got a chance to finish it up.

The Sweet Block's Stask:


Here was the stash pre-cut sitting in my living room for a while waiting for some TLC:

The design was printed and ready.  The fabric was picked and ready.  Me, NOT ready.

All the design prints are from Moda fabrics - Keiki Tweet Tweet and Momo Freebird.  The solids are Moda Bella solids in white and others from the order at Fabricworm.com.  Again, I am working on keeping track of fabrics a little more closely, but struggling with it as usual :P.  I just love fabrics and if it's pretty, high quality, goes with the design of the quilt I will not hesitate to us it.  So, I do use fabrics from sorts of designers and collections in the same quilt.
 
Another reason that I forgot to mention, was it was my first time cutting triangles for a quilt. As you can see from the design below, there are quite a few triangles to tackle:


There's a total of 140 triangles.  I guess it's not a huge amount but it was for me - a newbie when I comes to triangles.  Here's how I went about cutting them:

I cut squares out first and then cut each of the squares in half diagonally.  Each square gave me 2 triangles.  Hopefully I have the measurements correct for attaching it the quilt....

I can't wait to get this quilt pieced together - a big part of it is that I want to see if my design measurements worked out :P since this is my first quilt with triangles.

Borders and Scripes - Design & Piecing

Remember this fabric that I posted a while back?

Strips that I cut up a little while back.

Well, I finally got around to making a pattern for it :).  I decided to use the strips on the left side in the photo above - the one without the brown order attached.  There's 4 strips, but I'm only going to use 3 for the next quilt.  The pattern's goal was the maximize the great design of these strips of fabric.  So I decided to design something that wouldn't involve having to cut up the strips.
 
Here's the design front of the quilt:

The blue in the design (or B) will be will the border strips are going to be.  The dark brown and green are also patterned fabrics.  The beige and lighter brown will be solid colors.  The dotted lines is where I'm planning to do some decorative hand quilting.

So, I decided to take the length of the fabric - 75" - and make it the width of the new quilt.  This way I don't have to sacrifice any of the length.  The completed quilt will be 74"x80".

This will be the quilt back:

I thought about using the 4th strip of the border fabric for the back, but decided against it last minute.  I didn't want the back to distract from the front any. So I repeated the solid beige and lighter brown color for the back of the quilt - alternating.  This picture make the back look bigger than the front, but trust me it's the same height and width.

The Borders and Stripes stack all ready for piecing:

I always live the look of the fabric after it's been cut - ready for piecing :).

I can't wait to start on this quilt.  I'm a sucker for earth tones and I love the look of this border.

Cutting Long Strips

Doing something new again ... cutting fabric into long-long strips.  Which ones?

Remember this?

I'm going to tackle the one with blue flowers first - pictured about 1/3 of the way down.

Yep it's the Bryant Park fabric I got a little while back.  Still don't have a concrete design in mind yet for this fabric - though I have a few things in mind.  All of which involves cutting the fabrics into strips.  So, let's get snipping.

I'm going to do the one with blue flowers with long borders first - Bryant Park Floral Stripe Natural (I think - again I'm not good about keeping track of my fabrics especially the design names).  Since I'm cutting along the length of the fabric and the one with blue flowers is 2 yards long, I decided it'll be easier to tackle the cutting with scissors.

Where to cut?  There's a brown border running along side the flowers.  My first instinct was to cut that in the middle and try to keep some of the border in the quilt.  But since the brown border was less than 1" wide it will not be significant if I tried keep it in by cutting it in half.  So I decided to cut two types of strips - one with ALL the brown border on both sides and one with no brown borders at all.

The first cut - oops I should have cut on the OTHER side of the brown border!  Arg - oh well onward....

First cut - not so cool.  I was suppose to cut on the other side of the brown border.  Oh well, not I have more selvage to use for misc projects :(.  Check out Jacquie's blog for a cool selvage project.


Cut cut cut...

Showing off the two different strips I get from one fabric - the one with the brown border is about 7 inches, and the one without is about 5 inches wide.  All the strips are 72" long - perfect for a full quilt width or maybe a lap quilt length-wise?

Cutting with scissors after using a rotary cutter for all other quilting cutting was different.  I love the feel of the scissors against the fabric - I use a Clauss 8" scissor - quite heavy and feels solid.  Some may think that's a little odd - but I also use wooden #2 pencils for almost the same reason.  I just really like "old fashion" equipment.  I like the heavy feel of it, I like how it's very reliable, and it last FOREVER!  Haha okay, a #2 pencil does NOT last forever, but it's been around for almost forever :P.

Okay back to the fabric.  After cutting along all the borders,  this was the result:


The Stack - 4 strips without brown border, and 3 with.  Can't wait to find out what I'll decide to do with this ;).  Wish I have more time to design...


I'll update once I decide on a design :).