Trimming Troubles

Good morning, my friends. Don't let my mention of "troubles" scare you. It's all fixed now. You needn't worry. I took care of it. You're welcome. We'll get to that in a minute, but first...quilting.

The quilting is going well, and my wrist is cooperating so far. Please follow me into the quilting room. Oh, and if you're worried about your safety, you can rest easy. Smitty is on the job, guarding the entire upstairs portion of the house.

Three more blocks are quilted now. 

My wrist feels fine this morning. This amount of quilting takes no longer than a half hour, if that long. As I've mentioned to a few of you, I'm starting to think the Bowflex is contributing to the problems with my wrist. Either it's the culprit altogether, or it's the combination of the two things. For now, I'm going to avoid the Bowflex while I'm quilting a large quilt. I'll substitute the treadmill for those days. It wouldn't mean missing many workouts since I can usually quilt a large quilt in a week or less. Today, I'm going to quilt the remaining six blocks and see how that goes. If my wrist will cooperate, I can start on the sashings and cornerstones tomorrow.

From there, I made my way to the basement sewing room. Smitty...always the purrtector...was already there waiting for me.

I'm sewing this Shop Hop 3.0 quilt into a finished quilt top. A while back I asked if you guys thought this needed sashing, and the consensus was that a narrow sashing would help separate the books. I cut the strips to 1-1/2 inches, so the finished strip is one inch. After sewing the first row together, it looked like this.

Okay, and so I moved on to the second row. When I laid it down next to the top row...oy. Do you see the difference in the lengths of the two rows? And see how the sashings don't meet up? Sigh. Obviously, I neglected to trim those blocks to size before I sewed them together.

When I started with this, I looked at the first block and measured it to determine the length of the sashings. The first block was trimmed correctly. The remaining three had never been trimmed to size. I figured this out when I was pressing the blocks for the next row and the second block was larger than the first. When I realized they were not all trimmed to the proper size, I looked uneasily at that first finished row. Sure enough...drat.

Okay, so there was only one thing to do...take it apart and redo it. No crying...just doing. When it was all redone, it matched up as I'd hoped.

The rest of the day was spent measuring and trimming the remaining 12 blocks. I only found two that weren't the proper size. I can only think I was so happy to be finished with the paper-piecing portion of these that I just put them away quickly without finishing the job. Hopefully, they won't give me any more trouble.

So today I'll be quilting the remaining six blocks for Domestic Affairs. And I'm hoping to get all the blocks sewn together for the Shop Hop quilt. When I've sewn the rows together, I'll add a horizontal sashing between them, and then a narrow border around the outer edges. I've been scoping out some fabrics to use for the back on Etsy. There are a lot of cute book fabrics. I settled on this one:

Okay, so there's not much else on the agenda for today. I realized last night I needed to do some laundry today, but otherwise...NBS. The sun is shining, but the temperature is only in the 20's. It'll be a good day to stay inside, sewing while looking out.