Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Like sands through the hourglass….The quilt came together

It took some time, and a whole morning on our knees, to place the 300 x 5 inch hourglass blocks** so that no two feature fabrics or white-on-white triangles touched each other. You just wouldn’t believe how many times we checked, and still found wrong ‘uns we’d missed!

Then there was the distribution of colours to be considered. And someone thought it would be fun to put the wine bottles near the grapes, and the lemons near the gin and tonic glasses!

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IMG_8576 We stacked the blocks in rows, labelled the top block in each pile with its row number and an arrow indicating which way the rows ran, then bagged them in separate freezer bags and took half each to work on at home.

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Rather than sewing each row separately I used a tip from Linda’s Stitchin’ Mission class and sewed up to 4 rows simultaneously, creating a “web”. It’s a bit like multiple chain piecing and saves time because you aren’t continually stopping and starting.

In the photo below you can see where I’ve sewn the 1st and 2nd blocks of rows 3 to 6. I went on to sew the 3rd blocks in each of those rows … and so on.

IMG_8721 This created a “web” of thread holding each completed row together.

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You can see my rows held together by the “web” in these photos.

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Finally, I sewed the long rows to each other, and in another sewing session we joined our quilt halves together.

IMG_8732 We were very happy with progress so far!

**We’d actually made the whopping total of 390 hourglass blocks! Why so many?

Well, that’s another story…     You could ask Di B :-))

4 comments:

  1. Wonderful, wonderful! I simply adore this quilt. The beauty of it is in its simplicity. You've done a smashing job with colors, and I'm trying to guess which of the two of you made that BRILLIANT suggestion to position wine and grapes prints near to one another, and gin and tonic near to lemons. I love it! Thank you for the well-done "web" refresher too. Here's a place where it's quite helpful. You have both done an excellent job with this quilt.

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  2. Di, I almost always use the 'web' method of joining blocks because it's so easy to turn one block the wrong way, and that makes sure they stay oriented correctly. Before I discovered it, I once put together a quilt top and managed to turn just about every block the wrong way!

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  3. A design wall would have been good for laying out the blocks but who's got a wall that big!!
    It looks fabulous and chaining the rows that way means no glitches.

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  4. I love how colorful this quilt is!
    Just beautiful!
    Micki

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