Itty Bitty Bow Ties

When I finished writing yesterday's blog post, I noticed Smitty was taking his morning nap on the easy chair in my office. A while back, I added a binding to a free motion quilting practice piece. It's used to cover the chair to prevent, um, cat crumbs from covering the chair. Smitty likes it. 

They always seem to understand and appreciate that certain quilts are meant just for them. 

After that, I headed into the sewing room. Recall that I had selected fabrics for a mini quilt, and I got straight to work cutting them. It required 30 black 1-1/2 inch squares, 30 print 1-1/2 inch squares, and 30 1-inch squares of each print. That took seemingly forever, but I got 'er done. 

My goal was to make little bow tie blocks that would end up at 2-1/2 inches unfinished. And you probably know how this goes. The one-inch prints were chain pieced to the black 1-1/2 inch pieces. That went pretty quickly.

Then I trimmed off the corners...and at this size, I didn't save those bonus triangles. I might be crazy, but I'm not insane.

Those were pressed back, and then I was ready to get on with things.

The instructions said to sew a print piece to the right of the black pieces I'd just made. That seemed impossibly simple, but I decided to complete the first one just to be sure.

And, hey...that worked out great, so I just continued on. It probably would have been quicker to chain piece these, but I believed (rightly or wrongly) that doing them one at a time would improve my accuracy, so I soldiered on.

When I visited Temecula Quilt Co. last month, I had the very good fortune to have a conversation with the owner, Sheryl Johnson.

If you click on this blog post, you can see the astonishingly beautiful mini quilts she's made and has displayed in her store. Here's an expert, I said to myself. So, I wasn't shy about picking her brain for tips on how to improve my own accuracy. Did she trim her seam allowances? No. Did she press her seams open? No. She just sewed them like any other quilt block, but with great attention to accurate cutting and piecing. Even Mike looked at her quilts with open-mouthed amazement. To quote Sheryl,"When you make a 12-inch block, there's some wiggle room. Not so with these minis." No kidding.

So I was super careful, and I trimmed each block as I went. As I've said many times, I love these Creative Grids rulers. They are the best. This little 2-1/2 incher was perfect for trimming these blocks. I could place the center white circle right over the intersection of the seam lines, then line up the white lines on the seams and get a really accurate trim to size.

A while back, my dear friend Sharon Vrooman also suggested these Clover Fork Pins as a way to improve accuracy.

I was a little fumble fingers with them at first, but with repeated usage, they began to feel more natural. And they do help, although I can't say why exactly. Here's my guess: the gauge of the pin is smaller than with a regular glass-head pin, and so I worried less about sewing over them. Also, they allowed me to pin both sides of the seam allowance without distorting the block. With a glass-head pin, I have to pin sort of diagonally to get both sides of the seam, and that leaves them just slightly distorted and unbalanced.

So it took most of the afternoon, but by day's end, I had all 15 blocks made.

From there, it was pretty quick to sew the whole top together.

It measures 10-1/2 inches x 6-1/2 inches unfinished. Then I went scrounging around in my leftover bindings and pulled out a black one of a perfect length. From my multi-colored scrap bin, I pulled this piece of fabric to use for the back.

I'll get that sandwiched and quilted today. Probably I'll just quilt some diagonal lines over it and call it good.

Changing the subject, I've been gnashing my teeth about what project I'd like to do for this year's Rainbow Scrap Challenge. Mine isn't even started yet, but I've been keeping track of the colors each month. For my next trick, I'd like to get caught up on the blocks through April, but my first task was to decide what to make.

I'd considered multiple projects and rejected them for various reason. I liked some, but couldn't envision them in rainbow colors. Applique? No. Definitely not paper-piecing. Something that was straight piecing and not too fiddly. Finally, I found this project...

in this book.

I don't remember when or why I acquired this book, but there are some great projects between its covers. The one I've selected has 48 colored blocks (so, 4 per month), and 96 half-square triangles of black and white strips. It'll be a good one for my colored scraps, but it will also help me reduce the bulk of my black and white scraps. There are plenty of those too.

Having chosen a project, I'm committed to doing 4 colored blocks each month and 8 of the half-square triangles of black and whites. I'm hoping to catch up to April before the end of the month, and that's where I'll start my sewing when I finish up the mini.

Oh wait...but first I'll sew the names onto the first row of Shop Hop blocks and sash those together. The embroidery was finished up this morning.

So many projects...so little time.

My kitty awaits.