Make It Work - May 2, 2020

I used to watch a television show called Project Runway hosted by a guy named Tim Gunn.  Tim would go into the `workroom where the contestants were creating their clothing designs to check on their progress, and before he left the room, he would say, "Make it work!"

Well, that's what I'm doing to The Granddaughter's quilt.  In case you haven't read my previous post and don't know this, when I finished the log cabin quilt blocks, they were wildly inconsistent, despite my best efforts.  Yesterday morning, I stood at my sewing table and stared at them for a few minutes, then I picked up my rotary cutter and my ruler, and I trimmed those suckers down until they were all the same size.  Doing so resulted in the outer strips being narrower than the inner strips, but at this point I do not care. 

When I began to sew the blocks together, I quickly realized that I needed a "design wall."   The "standard" log cabin block starts with a square in the center of the block, and strips are added all the way around it until the block reaches the correct size.  My blocks begin with a 2" square in a corner and grow outward on two sides.  My plan is to sew them together "on point," meaning that I'm rotating the blocks 90 degrees so that they are assembled as diamonds instead of squares.  I kept sewing the blocks together upside down or sideways.  Finally, I stopped sewing and cleared enough wall space to hang a big piece of wool quilt batting.  The quilt blocks will stick to the batting, and I can stick all of the blocks up there, arrange them like I want them, then pull them off two at a time and sew them together in the right order.  Hopefully. 

It is such a nice day that I might try to start planting the vegetable garden.  I hope the ground is dry enough.  I hope the tiller will crank.