Work & Scraps & Nine Patches, oh my!

Work kept me pretty busy this past week as well as this weekend, but I did manage to squeeze in a bit of quilting time.  For a few of the evenings after work, I sketched out a quilt I want to make while watching TV.  The rest of the evenings were spent prepping my little 3 inch 9 patches for sewing into square in square units.  Echo closely supervised me while I was cutting the squares in half to make the triangles for the units. 

I don't mind Echo supervising because he's usually a hands off sort of supervisor.  He watches every movement very intently, but doesn't touch anything.  DH says he's "writing to the hard drive".  Sassy, on the other hand, is a micro manager, so she's not usually allowed to participate.

Here's what we had done after we finished the work pictured above...a box full of units waiting to be sewn.

And sew I did today.  In just a couple of hours, I was able to power all of the pinned units through the machine going first down one side, flipping the entire chain around, and then sewing down the other side and pressing both sides once the entire chain was sewn.  Most of the blocks were getting the first two sides sewn on, but a small stack had been ready for the second side.  This is where the project stands now.

 

You can see that the stack with the triangles on both sides has uneven edges.  This is on purpose.  The nine patch units are made from the leftover strips from a scrap club exchange back in 2003.  They were 1 1/2 inch strips, or they were supposed to be.  Some were actually a quarter inch too small, so the edges of some of the little 9 patches are very uneven.  There's not much room for fudge factor when they finish at 3 inches.  To resolve the discrepancies in size, I cut oversized squares in half from the stash of pre-cut squares.  That way I can trim the finished square in square units down to 5 inches.  As an added bonus, the finished blocks end up looking like the 9 patches are floating, which looks pretty cool.  This is an old UFO so I'm hoping to get the blocks done in the next week or so and then start laying out the top.

You might think that the "scraps" referenced in the post title refers to the scraps I used in the blocks above.  It does, but it also references these:

A fellow blogger was selling some of her scraps, which were mostly Free Spirit and Michael Miller fabrics.  My stash is severely lacking in large scale and modern prints, so these scraps are a nice addition to my stash.

And finally, Sassy started complaining when she saw that Echo got to be in the post, in the first picture no less, so I told her I would put in a picture of her as well.  God knows we have plenty of them.  Here's her supervising my work this week.  Actually, it looks like she's gone to sleep on the job.  Slacker.