I’m working today on a software go-live, which means I have 15 minutes to an hour of activity, followed by several hours of nothing but monitoring e-mail repeated several times today.  So, with one eye on the e-mail, I’m piecing.

All week I’ve been cutting the bright fabric for the graduation quilt, with the intent of taking it to the quilt retreat next weekend. I’ve got the fabric cut for the 4-patches and flying geese, so I thought I’d cut the gazillion squares I need from the black fabric.  I cut 110 (10 strips)  and decided that I should trying sewing a few before cutting the rest (if my math is right I need a total of 832 squares).

I’m making the geese with the stitch and flip method. It’s not necessarily the most efficient use of fabric, but since I’m only making 2 or 3 geese from each fabric and I started with bricks from my pre-cut box, it’s working for me.

This quilt needs 160 black & bright 4-patches, 256 geese (plus a ton of other pieces) so I need to do a bit of power sewing, but I’m also paying closer attention to detail.

You see, I really want to finish Orca Bay. It just needs the borders. But 75 of the pieced units had issues. Since I last posted, I fixed 4 of them – but I’m finding that I need to go back and re-work the pieced triangles. Which makes me want to box the whole thing up and do something else.

But because of these last 21 units, I’ve paid more attention to the piecing I’ve done on the black & bright units. In fact there was one goose that I attempted to stitch and flip the sky on 3 or 4 times before I decided it wasn’t meant to be and set the unit aside. Finally I ripped it apart and remeasured everything again.  The square was short on one side!

It works in this 2-patch, but no wonder I couldn’t get the goose to fly.

Butterscotch has the right idea. A nap would be good.  But I have a period of activity coming up with the go-live, so instead I’m going to rip the rest of the Orca Bay pieced triangles apart and build them from scratch — this before I cut any more of the black fabric for the graduation quilt.

As for what I’ll work on at the retreat? I’ll still be working on the graduation quilt – just different units.

Slowly I’m getting the border pieces done for Orca Bay. I have 75 units trimmed. The other 25 units have issues so there’s ripping and re-sewing in my future. My goal is to get all the units finished this weekend and maybe, just maybe get the border on the quilt.

Next weekend I’m going to a 2-day quilt day retreat.  22 hours if I last that long. So, I’ve started cutting the fabric for Eye Fooler, the quilt I’m making for my niece to take and work on. These pieces are for the black & bright 4-patches and flying geese.  I still have a few more pieces to cut and of course all of the black fabric. Once I get these units done, I’ll move on to the triangle in a square and half-square triangle units.