Planning requires paper

I do love making calculations for quilts and planning them out.  I found out on Sunday that writing things down on paper is much better for me than laying out different size blocks on the table/floor/design space and thinking I have the dimensions correct especially toward the middle to end of the day.  Two attempts at laying things out and then sewing without the math ended up with two failures in terms of sizing and no easy way of fixing it.

 This idea changed into string hourglasses.

 Which then changed back to an hourglass sampler of various sizes (2,4 or 6" finished).

The top part ended up two inches too big in one direction for the #DSTTchallenge as it should have been 20" in all directions, and then the bottom part ended up 2 inches shorter than I thought when I put it out on the floor.  But now I don't have to try to rush and finish it before the end of Wednesday.

Lesson learned.  Do the math and planning on paper before committing to a design in fabric.  This one was planned on paper and it was wonderful.  To make this a more reasonable size, I have a bit more piecing and planning to do.  Perhaps next weekend....

Two challenges

     This weekend I finished quilting my Modern Metallic Challenge quilt.  I quilted pebbles of various sizes in the middle of the rings, attempted to quilt "figure 8" in the rings, and densely stippled the negative space.  In fact it is so densely stippled that I think it is more dense than the pebbles.  I chose to machine bind it because it is not super fun to hand bind a quilt which is densely quilted.  Now I have a little more than a week to take "proper" photographs and submit it for possible display in Portland in August.  

     Instead of working on the three skorts that I have cut out and waiting to finish, I chose to try the Modern Traditional Mini Quilt challenge by Timeless Treasures and Dear Stella.  I do tend to like Modern Traditional quilts best.  I started with an intricate plan of a "do it yourself sampler" and changed plans to string HST.

     On a smaller scale, I could like it, but it wasn't a small enough scale.  To redeem some of it, I switched to making hourglass blocks with the HST.  And here is where it will stay for a few days.  This is randomly put together in an alternating pattern.  I need to do something more but I have not decided what that will be.  At the very least, I need a few more inches of "something".  And I'm nearly out of my white fabric.  I probably will not have a winning design, but I did manage to post a WIP picture so I could be entered into the random winner drawing of a charm pack or two.  I could live with that...

     I may go back to the random sampler idea again.