I hope this post finds you well!  I’ve been offline for the past few days.  It started off with a medical emergency for a family member – but if there’s a bright spot in that story, it’s that I had time to take my bag of stuff to work on patchwork of the crosses while I sat in the waiting room for hours.  And hours.

That’s really the great thing about English paper piecing; it really is so portable.  I try to have enough fabric basted so that I can sit down and just sew but in this instance, I was doing a little bit of everything.  I had 3 different people ask me what I was working on, 2 of which were quilters.  

One woman told me about her mother making quilts out of clothes that were no longer fit for wearing, etc. The memories had quite an impact on her, decades later (the woman appeared to be in her 70’s or 80’s).

Then the second time I got into a discussion was with a couple; the woman (also appearing to be in her 80’s) still hand pieces her quilts.  She went to a LQS recently to find someone to hand quilt it and was told no one does that any more and that everything was done by machine. In the end, she has a friend who lives in Beaumont who still does hand quilting so that’s where her quilt is now.

 I encouraged her to join a quilt guild in her area and told her about the social factor as well as the guest speakers.  And I’m pretty sure she might try her hand now at making a Lucy Boston quilt!

The latter part of the week was spent on a planned road trip but it also meant we left town before I found out what Thursday’s block was.  I happened to look onine that evening and…it was English paper piecing.  Really?  Really??? ‘Cause I could’ve brought that with me and had it done before I ever got home, just working in the evening.  So I spent what little free time I had on making another sashing piece for the patchwork of the crosses.

When I got home, the first thing I did was to print out the templates without noticing I’d left the settings at a 50% reduction.  This week’s blocks have hexies that are a mere 3/8″ in length on any given side, which meant I accidentally printed the template for 3/16″ size hexies.  No way!  Fortunately I caught that mistake immediately.  I printed out the templates since I don’t have any that size and then figured I’d stiffen the pieces up, so I cut some freezer paper and kept ironing and ironing and it wasn’t sticking.  What on earth? Why won’t this stuff stick to my paper?  Oh yeah….I’d picked up the wax paper instead of the freezer paper.  Hey that’s great.  Now I have this stuck to the bottom of my iron.  I remembered seeing a trick about how a dryer sheet is great for cleaning off the bottom of your iron.  

That probably actually works much better if your iron isn’t hot.  Because otherwise…it’s pretty much going to melt the dryer sheet.  Don’t ask me how I know that.

I finally figured out the easiest way to cut the templates out was to make crooked rows if you will out of the template pattern.  Cut to the left, then cut to the right and then snip that row into individual pieces.  That took entirely too long to cut all those out and I’m sure you probably heard me yell “I didn’t need to even cut all those hexie templates out!” when I in fact realized the pattern included a lot more than 42 pieces in it.  I should have counted as I cut them out.

As you can see, I did in fact get 42 tiny little 3/8″ hexies cut out, basted and sewn together.  I was busy talking to the daughter and got a little crazy glue basting it on, so that’s what the wet spots are on there but they’re gone now.  I wish now I had put this on a darker cream fabric because the centers blend in too much to the backgound fabric, even though those are 2 different fabrics.

That’s 35 blocks completed.  Today’s block is called Dashing by Chocolate so I’ll get it knocked out later today hopefully.

I’m planning to paper piece it so I loaded it into EQ7 so that it will be ready to go once I have time to work on it.  One of the other advantages to doing it this way is I can also see the most logical order to sew this.

In the meantime, I did manage to make some progress on the mariner’s star as well as some quilting on the Bloom block, but nothing to significant for either just yet.