Playing with Colours WIP

Made great progress on my latest WIP 'Playing with Colours'. Blocks came together very quickly and "ate" up most of the fabric.

Made a real silly mistake with my setting triangles though...as they had to be pieced I cut out squares of the blue fabric and cut half square triangles to attach to the white square...ha, ha...only to realise that this places the outer edge on the bias. Of course, I had cut up a whole lot of squares in preparation for this! I am really a bit out of practice with all my piecing at the moment.

After waking up to this and thinking this through in a bit more detail, I remembered my Companion Angle. Yah!...that allowed me to cut strips of fabric and then cut out the  triangles to the required size placing the outer edge on grain. Much better...can't believe I just overlooked this in the first place. However, this also meant that I was running dangerously short of the blue fabric.

This goes to show there is a good reason why one should always buy meters of fabric!



A few tips:

- think before cutting into any fabric!
- measure twice before cutting anything!
- pay attention to the seams when placing your blocks!

Yes, I did make a few more mistakes along the way like cutting an entire strip of blue fabric too short...in the end I had to do some very creative piecing to make this fabric go all the way.

To top it all of, when I had sewn all the blocks together and was about to sew the rows together, I realised that I had turned some of my blue four patch units the wrong way so that the seams did not face the right way for sewing the rows together! Can you believe it...I did undo lots of the blue blocks and one by one fixed them up...that took almost an entire day!

Finally yesterday it was time to square off this quilt top. Well, I can tell you that this took me several hours, as I took it especially serious. With hardly any blue fabric left, I could not afford to make any more mistakes, so I measured everything super carefully and squared it off bit by bit, taking my time with every step. This quilt will not have an additional border so it was important to get that right if I want a reasonably square quilt.

Turned out great! What a relief.

When I went through my stash the other day to look for suitable backing fabric I found this long forgotten heart fabric sitting right at the bottom of my container. I have got about 4 meters  of this...I could not believe it!  This is actually part of a range of  heart-themed fabric that I bought when it was on special. Not having any particular project in mind, this has just been sitting around. This is perfect as a backing for this quilt. Very cute.

 

 

This fabric is crisp and feels super smooth...so, would you wash this?  I did... in fact, I wash all my fabrics, even whites. This is because fabric contains certain chemicals as well as sizing,  apart from the fact that there is usually excess dye left in the fabric (and as I suspected there was a fair amount of red dye that came out in the wash...I use Colour Catchers when I wash fabric, so most of the dye is caught by that and anything left over will be rinsed out).

Quilting- wise not sure what I will do with this...for this project I was more focussed on the design and have not thought too much about the quilting. I don't think I will do an overall design as I think this could be too much. At the moment I am more looking at emphasizing the rows through the empty white spaces. We'll see. first I need to piece my backing together and then baste this baby.

Linking up to Anything Goes Linky Party at Stitch by Stitch. Check it out:

and WIP Wednesday over at Freshly Pieced

Karin