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Happy National Quilting Day

Today is National Quilting Day, which I always seem to miss (thankfully, a friend sent me an e-mail nudge.) Every year I do try to make something quilted on or around the day, even if I don't post about it. For this year I decided to get my $2.95 bag of vintage giraffe fabric scraps and make a small quilt.

Here are the three giraffe novelty prints I have to work with today.

And here are the chevron prints I got in the bag. I'm going to press and measure them first before I decide on what sort of patchwork to do. I'll be posting pics throughout the day to show you my progress, so stop by if you want to see how I do.

5:11 pm: getting a bit of a late start as my guy and I went out to a farmer's market and ended up visiting some thrift stores and having lunch at a neat little diner we found. After I got home and walked our dogs I was finally ready to get started on my quilt by pressing all my fabrics.

After measuring I realized I don't have quite enough fabric to do a baby quilt in the patchwork pattern I chose, so I pulled a few more remnant fabrics from my stash.

I also dug into my scrap bag and pulled out these two pieces leftover from other projects which also might work.

This is the patchwork pattern I'm using: Yellow Brick Road by Atkinson Designs. It's easy, it always turns out nice and I've made about a dozen quilts with this pattern, so there will be no surprises.

11:59 pm: I got a lot done tonight, starting with cutting all the fabric into the different size strips for the pattern.

The next step was to start sewing the patchwork together by combining and recombing the strip[s in different arrangements.

I ended up with 20 patchwork blocks for the quilt.

It's not very elegant, but I usually put my quilt top blocks together on the floor so I can look at them from above and make changes easily. This is roughly how the baby quilt will look once they're sewn together.

Finally I stacked and numbered each row to sew together tomorrow, as it's time for me to turn into a pumpkin. Happy National Quilting Day, my friends.

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