Saturday, April 7, 2012

I have decided that I’m going to take out the quilting I did on the border of my Mystery Quilt. It doesn’t add anything and I think it detracts from the flow of the borders. I cut out the pieces I need for the binding and the sleeve, but I will leave the ripping out for one night during the hockey playoffs. Hopefully we will be in long enough for me to get all of it done!

So what should I do today? I am behind (again) on my Block of the Month tutorials so I logged on and got the March blocks finished. We were working with strings, which I’ve grown quite fond of over the past week.

My strings all get jammed into a box, but since working on the string top last weekend I thought I had found a better way to organize them. It would be helpful if I had them in groups that were long strings (to fit down the diagonal of a block), shorter strings (to fill in the spaces to the corners) and some triangles (to fill in the corners). I managed to get a small number of my strings sorted in this way before I got bored and moved on.

Today as I watched the video tutorial the instructor was using color-matched strings. When I opened my box the colors I found in the first handful were predominately red and blue. While I stitched my first block I thought perhaps I should organize the strings according to colors. I wanted to use florals for the second block so I had to do some digging and resorting to come up with enough floral fabrics.

Since there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the way you might use these strings I guess jammed into a box might be the best way after all!

I cleaned up the studio when I finished and then started packing. I’m testing the new luggage that I’ll be using for our Italy trip. It seems to have plenty of room and I didn’t have to leave anything behind that I had planned to take. Mind you I’m only packing for one week as opposed to one month. I got my seats booked for all three legs of my journey and then we booked our seats for the long flights to and from Europe. It cost a bit more, but we went with seats that have extra leg room. We’ve never been on a flight of that length so I think it will be worth it.

There is a hockey game tonight so I’ll get a little more work done on my stitching project. I have an early start to the day tomorrow and I’m going to have to set the alarm. I hope I remember how!