Oliver's Birthday Quilt Part 7

We're at the final stage of assembling the top for Oliver's birthday quilt. I've sorted and rearranged all the patchwork blocks, and stacked them in sewing order. Now I'll put them together in seven rows of five blocks each:

Two tricks I use when sewing blocks into rows: I always mark the first block's left-hand corner with a safety pin, so I know where the row starts. I also add a post-it to each pile showing the row number and sewing direction so I don't sew them out of order.

Here's the first row of blocks sewn together:

And all seven rows sewn together:

I then sew the rows together to finish the quilt top. Here's how it turned out:

To give you a better idea of the size, here it is on the sofa in my office:

The top took about 35 hours of cutting, pressing and sewing to put together, and this is a very easy pattern that I've made many times. Once I've batted, backed and pinned it I'll hand quilt it, which will take another 40 to 50 hours. It's truly a labor of love, and also why I never sell my quilts. Paying myself minimum wage for labor plus the cost of the materials would mean I'd have to charge $700.00 for it just to break even. :)

Comments

nightsmusic said…

It's so pretty. He's got a gramma that loves him :)

June 12, 2020 at 12:13 PM

Downsizing

This was my fabric stash once I sorted everything -- 22 full bins. I spent a day taking out and boxing up what I could part with, with the goal of trying to reduce it by half, so I'd have 11 bins. I was very strict with myself, and removed everything that for one reason or another I was sure I wouldn't be able to use. This is what I ended up with -- 12 bins of fabric that I'm keeping. It's not quite half, but close enough. Half of what I took out went to a local quilter friend, a school and Goodwill. These four tightly-packed bins will be going to the local quilting guild once I make arrangements with them for a drop-off place. I am relieved and a little sad and now determined to control my impulses to thrift more fabric. I don't want to do this again, so until I use up six bins, I can't for any reason bring any new fabric into the house.

In Progress

I promised myself I would show you the good, bad and ugly of my cleaning this year. This is what it looks like when you dump thirty years' worth of stashed fabric on the floor -- and oy, what a pain in the butt to pick up again! This is what it looks like after it's been sorted, folded and placed in containers, which took me about a week. Now the hard part is to downsize my stash by at least half, I think (that's my goal, anyway.) I've already e-mailed the president of the local quilting guild, a local friend who is a quilter, and a public school art teacher I know to see if I can donate some of the excess to them. The rest will go to Goodwill. Already I've reduced my vintage textiles from two bins to one, and my scraps from three bins to one. It's probably the hardest clean-out I've done, which is why I saved it until last. I know I have too much fabric, more than I can use in my lifetime -- but at the same time, I love it. So I have to

Other Stashes

Along with clearing out the spare bedroom and tidying my office and our guest bedroom, I decided to reorganize some of my stashes. This is all the yarn I have on hand, sorted by color. It looks like a lot, but lately I've been using up a minimum of half a bin every month, so this is approximately a year's supply. All of my solid color cotton perle thread. I go through a lot of this every year, too. I need a container in which I can fit all of it together, but I haven't found the right one yet. I won't show you all of my fabric -- I'm still reorganizing this stash -- but I went through everything and donated two bins of fabric I won't need to the local quilter's guild.

Valerean

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