I will be reporting weekly sporadically on a new quilt on which I am working. I am in the cutting stage, and hope I will follow this through to a completed project.

• Quiltreport 1 here
• Quiltreport 2 here

March 18 — I made a Joann’s employee ever so happy tonight by coming in, 20 minutes before closing time, and pulling 17 bolts of fabric for her to cut. Hee. I went for the cheaper, non-Kona cotton (the Kona of the “wonderfully meaty hand”) at 2 bucks a yard. So I got out of there for under 30 dollars.

I will say it now. I hate spending money at chain stores; there are two independently-owned fabric stores in Ventura to which I try to be true. But here I am, frequenting Joann’s. My excuse: I’m poor. I’m not a good quilter. But I will be sad if these independent stores close. And my quilts fall apart because of the subpar material I use.

But anyway! I feel a little like I rushed through my fabric color selections; I fear there one of those neon-ish yellow-greens will stand out too much. Maybe it’s okay. We’ll see.

The patient employee who cut my fabric saw my many charts and calculations and piles of bolts. At the checkout she said, after handing back my credit card, “you are brave, Miss Rebecca, real brave!”

July – Why, hi! I seem to have taken several months off. In the interim, I reorganized my home — losing my stupid measurements in the process. See, that’s why organization is bad! And why paper and pen is bad!

Finally, ready to begin again, I had to appeal to Astrophysicist Roger to recalculate the piece measurements, since I seriously could not do that again without having a stroke. It took Roger 5 minutes and one Excel spreadsheet to provide me with calculations that were even better than before! I think he used physics, that’s why they were so good.

Last weekend Violet the Great White came over for a crafternoon. She’s starting her very first quilt, and I’ve been helping her in the process, as well as supplying cutting boards and cocktails. This time, I hunkered down and got to cutting my own pieces using my shiny new physics-created calculations.

Holy crap it took forever. As usual with quilts, shit takes so much longer than you think. I probably could have done a little more stacking and whacking, but the fabric, many colors in quarter-yard increments, were so haphazardly cut at Joann’s I had very little room for mistakes. As you can see, I marked each color with its corresponding letter in chalk. My chart goes to “Q” — that’s 17 colors, oy!

Next part is a fun part — the piecing and sewing of the quilt top. Hopefully I’ll get on this sooner than later, as I’ve got to be done with this to make way for another project that has an October deadline. More soon! I hope!

Go to Quiltreport 4: Science Quilt

Related hamlinks:

• Quiltreport 1
• Quiltreport 2
• My quilts and other projects on flickr
• Today, I taught someone to quilt
• Ducks in Bonnets!
• Gee’s Bend
• i’m a member of a qult