beginning of tumbling blocks

The dog got me up early on Wednesday (2/12) and I was at my sewing machine by 8:30 AM.  Other than my almost hour long phone call with Janice at 9, and a smurfy lunch that my honey fixed me at 1, and the dinner I had at 6…I was bent over the sewing machine…the iron, or the cutting table, working on my tumbling blocks.  Why oh why did I pick this pattern???  Because I am crazy??  Because I always do this?  The first quilt I ever made in my life was STORM AT SEA…an advanced pattern.  I had never quilted before…hadn’t taken any classes….don’t think I even knew any quilters…..just read the magazine and went for it.  I still have that quilt and someday I will post a picture of it.  I was so conservative, and match-y/match-y that you don’t even really see the pattern.  I made templates out of cardboard and cut each one of the over thousand pieces of fabric by hand with scissors…didn’t know about rotary cutters.  Didn’t know about borders…didn’t know about anything!!!  Then let’s talk about my weaving adventure….know nothing about weaving except that I wanted to do it and that my friend loaned me a 4 shaft floor loom.  I read a book and got started.  Of course I started with lace weight yarn…LACE WEIGHT!!!!  About the diameter of a human hair….it took 16 hours to warp that loom….SIXTEEN HOURS!!!!!  When that shawl was finished, I decided it needed a little something extra and proceeded to put over 200 teeny, tiny beads along the fringe.  Now here I am with this tumbling blocks pattern….could I pick something like Loree…something that looks so terrific that it jumps off of the page….heavens no!  Michael and I picked out the pattern we loved the best…and ordered 18 - 1/2 yard pieces of hand dyed fabric.  I spent hours and hours slaving away yesterday…and don’t even have one block completed (of course my CT friends know that that is because I am doing the anal Debbie method and not the BG/Mary Jo method J).  Anyway, by 8:30 in the evening, I was 1/3 of the way done with my first set of blocks.  There are a lot of steps and I tried to document most of them:

my strips were all cut several weeks ago.  I should be able
to make green blocks with blue centers (those are the only
ones I'm working on now) and blue blocks with green centers

first thing was to sew 3 strata, The strata have a large light blue,
medium blue and dark blue in the center, with small green strips
(also in light medium & dark) on the outside

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

each strata is cut into these 60 degree diamonds

each diamond (shown top) is cut into 2 trangles, with a small
slice left over

then each triangle has a second small strip put down
the other side.  It will take 6 of these triangles to
make one block....WHAT was I thinking?!?!?!

 

So, as of 8:30 only 1 strata had been totally tranformed into the triangles I need to do the blocks. 

I crawled upstairs and relaxed on the sofa and knit on a new baby sweater while watching TV with my honey for the rest of the night. 

And by the way….it snowed and snowed and sleeted all day and night and our complex is a sheet of ice everywhere and no one is going anywhere…probably until Saturday at the earliest.