Decision Made

 Working on Western Sun, a pattern of an antique quilt that I have always loved, I was torn between staying true to the original design layout or using a cheddar cornerstone between the rows of Flying Geese sashing. I wrote about this recently here, and here.

A few people liked the cheddar cornerstone, and no one spoke in defense of the original so I went with the cheddar. Eager to get started sewing the top together, I first worked on a color layout design once all 25 of the full blocks were done.

To be able to see them all, I just put them on the design wall without space for the sashing. After snapping a photo to refer to, I was good to go. 

I made one corner block, a quarter block, for the upper left corner and made a few half blocks for the perimeter triangles so I could start. Let the assembly begin:

Scrap quilts are my favorite kind and I  have made many over the years. First, I pull fabrics for a "palette", then start cutting the required size pieces I need. As I worked on this, I knew I would need to cut more fabrics, but how much more?  Once I got this far, I could easily see and count blocks that were left to make and figure out how much to cut. 

Here is what is cut and on hand currently:

So, I "did the math" and about all I need to cut is the parts for the Flying Geese sashings. I need to cut 183 "geese", from 46 squares--they are Quarter Square Triangles. Then I need to cut 333 pairs of "wings" from squares--that's a lot of cutting. But I am happily using up some favorite fabrics that have lived here way too long. 

Using Electric Quilt 8 (EQ8) helps me so much when playing around with quilt design. The book this pattern is in, Butternut and Blue by Barbara Brackman and Karla Menaugh, has the quilt at 45" square, with only 5 full blocks. Mine is 110" square, if I add the border I think I will add, so it's a lot different.

Here is my sketch of the original design in EQ8--the sashing is ALL geese:

And the sketch with the cheddar cornerstones that I ultimately decided to use:

I don't try to match fabrics very carefully in EQ8 with my quilt designs because I use so many different fabrics and adding lots of them to the project file makes it really BIG. I just try to get the feel for what the quilt will look like overall. In this second one, I did work with color placement since all 25 of the full blocks were done and they all  had to go somewhere. 

Back to cutting out fabric and making the remaining 7 half blocks, 3 corner blocks and all those flying geese sashing units. I'll be in the Studio, if you need me...

Let's quilt,

Barbara