Piecing a sashing

Hi all!  Well, it's still hot and sticky and rainy, our house still hasn't sold, and I'm still stressed.  We have a moving date, though, so maybe things are looking up!  I'm meeting with my new colleagues this week and making good progress on getting ready for this fall, plus I've packed up most of the kitchen, so it's takeout city around here-- my favorite thing!

Over the last few days I was trying to figure out the sashing and cornerstones for my coral quilt.  If you recall, I am making these blocks for a quilt, and I got the idea from the Pantone quilt challenge from Bryan House Quilts and no hats in the house. I know, I missed the challenge deadline, but that was not my motivation anyway, especially once I made a few blocks.  After several tries, here's what I came up with for the sashing:

What do you think?  It took a little while but I think I finally hit on the right thing for this quilt.  I love these blocks and I really wanted a pieced sashing that would complement the blocks without taking away from them.  The cornerstones will be the coral square in a square pieces. 

To make these sashing pieces, I started out by drawing them out, intending to paper piece them.  That worked okay, but I did eventually just cut the pattern up and use it as a template instead.  It worked out better for me that way.

When I drew out the sashing, I forgot that I would need to put the pieces under the paper before stitching to make it work.  The way it was drawn wouldn't allow for that,  which is why I'm not a paper piecing designer.  But it worked great as a template!

I'm thinking of putting some of the green in a pieced border, though I haven't sketched any of that out yet.  I definitely think it's going to need a pieced border, though.  Maybe with some flying geese?  Or maybe the green should be the binding?  Hmmm. . .

Anyway, that was a kind of a nice exercise for me, and now the quilt is all designed, so it's time to finish making those blocks.  I'm still having to do this in short bursts, so maybe one or two at a time will work out.  I'll definitely finish this quilt this fall (she said!  We know that's a long shot, right?)

Hope everyone is having a good week!  People keep trooping through the house, and one of them is bound to buy it, right?

Sharing at Let's Bee Social.

Making it up as I go

Ever have one of those days when you have so many projects going on that you can't decide which one to work on, so you end up working on nothing?  Yeah, I've had those, too!  I almost had one this week, in fact.  I have a lot of unfinished stuff laying around here and I organized it all and then couldn't decide which one to take on first.

Thankfully, I have had this same problem before, so I knew the best thing to do was just grab whatever was closest and start stitching.  That's how I ended up working on the 1-1/2 inch square project.  In the process of stitching up more blocks I also figured out how I plan to set them:

Yep, this will be it!  As you can see, the first thing I did was put a 1-1/2 inch white strip around the 100-patch blocks.  This stabilized all the little seams on the edges of that block and also meant that there would be no nightmare scenarios that would involve matching all those seams from block to block.  (Can you imagine?)

I had played around with having strips of alternating white and colored squares surrounding each block, but it turns out that all those strips of squares are really stretchy!  Plus I had this thing about making sure all the seams matched up with the seams in the block, even though they were separated by that solid white.  Talk about crazy-making!  So I gave up on that and went with just the squares in the corners.  That way I'll still get to use up some more of the eleventy-billion squares I have and I'll get this cool pattern:

Is that cool or what?  If I use 4-patches as cornerstones with some white sashing, I'll use up even more squares and have a super-cool secondary pattern too.  And I am all about the super cool secondary pattern!  For some reason I hate making 4-patches, but I'll do it for this.

These blocks are actually going pretty quickly, considering.  The hard part is sorting out all the colors:

I know I should have sorted them all at once, but I did start out with about 12,000 of these babies, and that's a lot to sort through!

I don't know how many of these blocks I'll eventually make or how big the quilt will be, but I'm pretty sure it will look good, and I'm having a good time making it, even if it is a mess:

Hope you all are having a good time making fun messes too!  It's still raining almost every day and it's pretty cold for May, and I have no garden, so I expect to get a bunch of sewing time in this week.  At least I hope that's how it goes--you know what happens with sewing plans!

Linking to Let's Bee Social and Oh Scrap!

Laying the floor

Hi everyone!  So, I've had enough of the heat, how about you?  Ever since we got to town it's been in the high 80s and 90s and I'm pretty used up on it.  Maybe three weeks is all the summer I can stand. Yikes!  What if I'm secretly a cold-weather person and never knew it?  At least I'll have quilts to cover up in!

So, this week I am working on the Roman Floors blocks.

Oh, how I miss the fence!

I need 72 and have about 30 now.  I also got a really beautiful black batik to use for a thin sashing between the blocks.  Here's where I need your help:  I can't decide if I want a 1/2-inch sashing or a 1/4-inch sashing.  Here's the 1/2 inch: 

I measured and that is a half-inch between the blocks.  The blocks are large, so it could work, but it looked too big to me, so I tried it with a quarter inch:

I like this better, but I'm not sure how well it fits with those big blocks.  What do you think?  Maybe I'll just split the difference and go with 3/8-inch sashing.

Boring pictures, I know!  But while I was fooling around stitching the (many) hsts for the blocks, I decided to try another block based on this floor:

I did it in pink, not orange, but this is what I came up with:

I like this a LOT.  I think I made the center square too big, though, so I need to try it again with a slightly smaller center.  It's hard to see, but there is a wrinkle where I pressed the bottom left triangle away from the square, which is what leads me to believe it's too big.  But it was fun and easy to make, so that's a plus.

Anyway, that's what I've been up to this week.  I'd love to get this floors quilt done, because I think it's going to look spectacular.  Plus, I'll be wanting something cozy to cuddle up in later this year, won't I?  It really will stop being hot sometime, won't it?  Hope springs eternal!

Hope you get some good stitches in this week!  See you Friday!

Linking to Let's Bee Social, and WIP Wednesday.