T-Shirt Quilt Sew Along Part 7: The Binding

 This is the best part.

Because when you’re done, you’re done…

I had a plan for this one…and I made the mistake of working when I should have been sleeping. Don’t do that…but it worked out…and I think I like what I ended up with better than what I planned…

So, what I intended to do was make some diagonal strips with all of my leftover t-shirts in no particular pattern – just randomly picked up and cut into strips and sewn together…so I would have some white, grey, black, and gold in there.  Then, somewhere in the process, I would add some of those thin t-shirt pieces that I took of sleeves and shirts with smaller wording and images on them into the long strip of binding. That was the plan…

HOWEVER…due to my poor sleep habits, I somewhere came up with the idea just to do black and gold and work the t-shirt strips in…so I worked on that for a bit...hated it….went to bed. Almost in tears. It wasn’t hard…it was just…you know…unproductive….

This is what I ended up with when I stopped…adorable…if you want to make a bumble bee quilt or some caution tape…

So, if you want to do this, or something similar, just cut strips the same width. If you don’t want them to be the same size, cut them different widths.  They don’t have to match up in length.  Then, sew them together on the long cut edges.  If you want them to be straight, line them up straight, if you want them cut on a diagnoal, line them up with about a 1-2 inch overhang on each progressive strip.  I neglected to that on the one shown…but it will save you waste when you cut it for the binding.  Use your binding ruler, and cut it to the width you need.  I cut mine about 2.5″.  

And then threw it all in the scrap pile. Because maybe some day I’ll do a construction quilt or make a bumble be costume?  I’ll happily take a custom order for something of the sort… Sigh.  Moving on…

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Here’s what I ended up doing in the end –

I cut some strips out of my leftover t-shirts, and my random skinny pieces from the shirts, cut those all the same height, and didn’t worry about the length.

I sewed them together as if I were making a long strip of bias tape (great tutorial for that over at sew4home.com – just scroll down about to the middle of the post if you are starting with strips already).  Basically, your are going to lay the strips on top of each other at a right angle, right sides together, and then sew a diagonal line…make sure that when you open it, they form a continous strip (sounds simple, right? It is, really, I PROMISE…just do practice first if you haven’t done it before…)  I didn’t make a full continuous length yet – I took a few long pieces and pinned them to quilt edges to see how I liked the placement with the t-shirt pieces…

And then pinned it around in a few places and made some adjustments…I ended up working on one edge at a time…this made my life easier. Because making my life easier is very important sometimes. This will work on a t-shirt quilt – probably not so much on a traditional one….

I picked an edge and started sewing. I did the sides first, then let the top and bottom binding overlap that.  I stitched over those once finished to make sure they were closed and wouldn’t get snagged…sorry, I didn’t get a picture of that – were at “go time” by now…I’ll try to get one later if you’d like to see it. You may be able to zoom in to the picture at the bottom of the post and see that?

All I did was fold it over, pin it in place and sew a straight stitch – I did not do the pressing, ironing folding over (I did press as I added the strips together). So, you I have a raw edge. It is not folded under and it is only sewn once…instead of attaching the binding, folding over and then stitching on again.  I just didn’t see that going well with t-shirt fabric…and I like the look of the raw edges.

Anyway, there’s the binding…all it’s finished glory. You’ll have to wait for the next post for the big reveal and full shot of the entire quilt…because I have to tell you the story of the man behind the quilt and why I enjoyed this project so very much. So, get sewing and I’ll get that last post up soon! In that post, I’ll also share some links to helpful tutorials and tips and some final thoughts on the process.  In the meantime, I’ll bask in the glory of having actually finished this project and loving it.  It’s a a beautiful moment…

T Shirt Quilt Sew Along Part 6: Backing and Quilting

Time to add the backing!

Woot Woot!  I think this is one of the things that frightens people the most about quilting.  Surprisingly, it’s much simpler than I anticipated.  So jump on in and don’t be afraid.

Unfortunately, the fabric I had stashed for this project ended up being a little too small once I had everything put together (yes, I didn’t do enough pre-planning of my blocks…don’t judge.)

So, I measured out my finished top and headed to the fabric store (with the top in tow  – you know, just in case).  Found some yummy soft sweatshirt fabric after fondling some knits and fleeces and flannels…took it over the cutting counter…the nice lady cutting my fabric was kind enough to help me double check my measurements, and we were good…so back home for more sewing!

I did not use any batting because the backing material was pretty thick already.  Probably wouldn’t have, anyway, on this project.

I laid it out folded in quarters and squared everything up, trimming as little as possible…

Spread it way out on the floor, pressed it on the floor…made sure my top was good and pressed and ready to go –

Grabbed my basting spray and got started.

I started by folding the top over in the middle and sprayed and smoothed small sections from there, and then did the same thing on the other half.

Once basted, I used those fancy curved quilting pins (yep, they’re awesome – who would have thought such a simple little thing could be so life altering?  I probably put in way too many pins…but oh well…I pinned the heck out of it  – starting from the center and working my way out again.  I probably had a pin every 5-6 inches or so.

That’s it. done there. If you want, you could stitch baste by hand or machine around the edges a little just to hold things in place – I did not do this.

Moving on – gotta get some quilting done!

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Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star…

To get this baby quilted, I started by straight stitching around the stars (through the top and back) that were already on the blocks.  That gave it a good hold, but not really quite enough quilting.  So, I called in my little elves to help me cut out some stars from scrap fabric.  This is where I used the templates  – I traced some of the stars from the blocks onto the template and cut those out.  The elves cut the stars from some left over t-shirt scraps. There were three of those little guys, but this is the most cooperative one that let me get a sort of decent picture.

The stars where sprayed with basting spray and pinned on where we thought they would work best and then I headed of to the sewing machine again – It was quite an adventure sewing around all of those little stars on my machine (no long arm…), but I managed to twist and roll and tuck and turn and get it done.  That’s about it! Not a ton of quilting, but enough…on the back, you can can just barely see an outline of the stars.  And they are very random, so I didn’t have spend a riduculous amount of time making sure everything was placed just so… Hard to see, but here are a couple of shots of that…

Side note – I have not at this point trimmed away the excess fabric from the back – you can do that if you want…I saved it for when I put the binding on just in case I needed a little wiggle room.

And, that’s it! All done with that…now we can move on to the binding….Next time!

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T Shirt Quilt Sew Along Part 5: Little Details

This quilt was a bit more challenging and time consuming than I originally intended it to be…but it was worth every minute…so here are a few tidbits on how I made some things work – I suppose I could have included this with the blocks and rows and such, but it just seems so overwhelming and like so much information. Had this not been my first, though, I don’t think I would have had to work so hard at it.  It all came together quite beautifully.

At this point, of course, I am writing up the information after finishing the quilt – because, as life does happen – my internet connection in the workshop did not cooperate, nor did time…I have to admit here that I put the finishing stitches on this quilt about an hour before everyone showed up at our home for dinner on Christmas day.  But, it was finished and wrapped up and under the tree…

  First, Laying it all out to make it work was a challenge.  I think I mentioned that I wanted everything to be same size in each row – and that I wish I had thought this through a little more in the beginning…I love the finished product and, when all is sewn and done, I am glad it worked out the way it did – but would have much rather have started with something much less complex…like, you know, cutting the same size squares out of t-shirts, and simply sewing those together.  I would highly recommend that if this is your first go around.  I can’t count how many times I rearranged, layed out, rolled up, stacked up…and so on and on and on and on….

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A few outer column details…

This piece was fun – I wanted to somehow hang on to the buttons – because these were two of Papa’s favorite shirts – and I just it would be fun….So, I put the shirt, right side down, on top of a square the same width as the others in the column and stitched it on in the center – opened it up, pressed it open, and did a quick top stitch. I also basted it on around the open edges so it would stay put. A little visual sequence:

Here is one little piece – I had two of these, so I put one on each side.  I simply stitched these to a square that matched up with rows with a contrasting piece of scrap t-shrit behind them to give them some pop. I used a zig-zag stitch – a straight stitch or pretty decorative stitch work here as well.  I used a quick shot of basting spray to hold it still while I sewed.  There are some pictures of that process for another piece below…

Same thing here…had two, so balanced those out on either side – did a straight stitch outlining the V, and then trimmed away excess leaving about 1/8 or 1/4 inch or so on the outside of the stitch. I had these overlapping the buttoned shirts above.

And, here are those three pieces all put together — the third photo gives a little sneak peak of the finished corner.

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 The next block in one column required a little piecing – so here are a couple of shots of that.  – the two whites were sewn together, with the grey piece sewn onto one with a black piece of scrap sandwiched between the two – and the gray strips added to get the width right.  This is what I did ablve for the little oval pieces….

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One of my faves…

Next to Elmo, this is probably one of my favorite details, and I’m probably the only one htat will ever know it’s there…except for my husband…whom is painfully aware of more details than he ever cared to hear about. Bless him. And any of you that have managed to read this far…bless you, too.

There’s a quilting rule that says you MUST put your name or at least your initials and the year somewhere on your quilt.  This is usally tucked in corner, or on the back or on a tag…sometimes even hand written somewhere on the quilt…Being the lucky owner of several family quilts that are not marked, I get this.  It’s not about being narcissistic.  Whoever owns this quilt 50 or 100 years from now will want to know who made it… so I found this sweatshirt at Goodwill – It had ‘Vanderbilt’ hand embroidered on the chest.  I don’t know if this was someone’s homemade creation, or if it had at one time been available on campus?  Who knows! If anyone has ever seen one before, I’d love to know!  No, I don’t claim to be an embroiderer…didn’t even try to pretend that I could make such lovely stitches…

In the beginning, I wasn’t sure where I would use it – maybe it would be a big star on the back? Maybe a little circle or square or triangle?  Possiblities are endless…I did manange to NOT cut this one because I knew when I decided where I wanted it, I didn’t want to have worry about having cut it incorrectly.

When I got to the binding (More to come on this in Part 7, and if you jump over there and see what I did with that, you’ll see why it was a perfect fit), I finally figured it out…yep. It took that long.  I cut into a strip the same width as the binding, and ’embroidered’ (I use that term loosely…) my initals, the year, and ‘For Papa’ onto the strip.  I almost dug through looking for some embroidery floss – pretty sure I have some somewhere, but then remembered that I had at some point pulled away a super thin thread of t-shirt while cutting something – and well…hello!  Let’s do it with a piece of t-shirt 😉 –

I grabbed a black scrap and sliced off a slither, and stretched it out as much as I could – if you try this, don’t make too thin or it will snap on you.  Dug through my needle stash, found the one with the biggest eye I could, forced it through, and got to work…a little cheesey, yes, but maybe that’s why I love it so much…

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 Ok, I think that’s it for now – I’m sure I could prattle on some more…Next time, we’ll add the backing and get it quilted.  Are you seeing a light at the end of the tunnel yet?

Hope you’ve gotten started on yours!

Much love, Cindi

T Shirt Quilt Sew Along Part 4: Sewing the Blocks and Top

This is the fun part – and where you get to see things start to coming together…

*Updated – all complete – Part 5 will get into a little more detail on the outer columns…because, really, how much can we absorb at once?  Enjoy!

This will be a long post with lots of pictures and some commentary on what I did. Remember that your quilt will be different, and you don’t have to do what I do – make it your own!  I just hope that you can learn something helpful.  Also, with this one being so long, please know that I will not be doing everything in this post in one sitting.  I will be chunking as much as possible – mostly because, really, who has the time to sit and do this all in one sitting?

Look at your layout, make a plan for the day or even hour that you have right now and think about what your stop point is. I am going to try to finish a colum in a sitting, but if I can’t, maybe I can just get trim pieces cut, or a couple of blocks ready to sew together…

I have all of my shirts pinned onto a sheet where I want them to land on the finished quilt, and I am taking them off as I work on each section.  This makes it easy to roll it up and put it away if you need (this actually happened when Papa came by – can’t get caught!!!)

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I am going to start on the center column. That’s my main focus, so I want everything else to work with that. If all of your shirts are cut the same size, you can start wherever you want. This is one of those moments where I wish I had left everything uncut until I was sure about my layout…but at the end of the day, I think I am happy with it so far, so all is well…

I want everything to be the same width here…so I will take some of my leftover grey t shirts and make strips to widen the pieces that were too narrow. You have some options here…I decided to do strips because I want a more sort of quilted look. If you want to make this a little easier or faster and you have enough shirts to work with, you could just just stitch your pieces straight onto a full size block and let the raw edges show. May do that on another one someday. I’ll cut all my strips a little wider than I think they need to be, figuring I can always cut them smaller later…

I am laying them out around my shirt pieces to figure what direction etc I wanted them to end up…don’t forget … MEASURE TWICE, CUT ONCE! Now, I am going to sew the pieces together that don’t need trim, or that will be trimmed together. On the piece in this photo, I’ll go ahead and add the side trim so I can attach the longer pieces on the top and bottom without having to try to squeeze in the trim later.

Now to sew on the trim… And even things out a bit.  

I will attach the trim, flip everything to the back side and press my seams open – I neglected to take a picture of this – but I’ll try to get you one later. Proper quilting technique would be to sew your seams over together to the dark block, but I want add top stitching, so I opened them up instead so I would have two layers to sew.  I’m hoping this won’t cause a problem with durability later?  This is entirely up to you…

Little bonus tip – see how everything waves a alittle after it’s sewn together? don’t worry too much about that – check your tension and all of that – I find that it ironed out nicely.  So, no biggie.  Also, you’ll see if you look closely, that I made a mistake in my trim measurements, and ended up adding more – it happens. It’s fixable.  Golden Rule.  Measure twice…cut once…sigh.

Now I get to work on Elmo..I don’t even want to attempt to make him his own block…so I’ll grab my basting spray and stick him where I want him. Any temporary fabric spray will work for this. Or even basting glue (did you know it comes it sticks?  Very handy for patches and such…completely off topic). The extra fabric will pull right off and the spray or glue will wash out.   I prefer the spray on things like this…just cause.

With Elmo stuck on, I am just going to sew around him as closely as possible…I did a straight stitch because it is so small…you could do a zig zag or decorative stitch here.  Please don’t judge my not awesome stitching here.  Isn’t Elmo awesome? Still my favorite detail…

And now it’s time to to attach all of these blocks together…This part feels good…like some realy progress happening.

I did notice that my bottom block is cut a little close to edge, so I will add a strip there. I don’t think that would be a big deal if I were adding another block there, but that is where the binding will go, so I want a little more room to work. I’ll save that job for later, just in case I decide to add more blocks around the whole thing, or about how I want to do the binding.  I can change my mind, right?

So, there you go…one column done. Next I will lay that out with everything else that is waiting for blocks and see how it’s looking.

And me likes…so now I get to move on to the two surrounding rows…

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All right, here goes some more…are we having fun yet?

I want these next rows to be a little  narrower than the center row – so they’ll kind of frame it – so I’ll do the same process again – measure how big the strips need to be, cut them a little bigger than that so I have room for mistakes.  I didn’t have any yellow t shirts, all I had was a yellow sweatshirt – but I am saving that for later…so off to Goodwill….I came with a bag full of yellow shirts…probably more than I need. When I started shopping, I was a little worried about everything being too many different shades of yellow and having to make sure I balanced those out with each other…but, alas, I hit the JACKPOT…4 Nashville Predators Gold Out shirts, and a Vandy bookstore shirt – all the same color. Because I’m HAPPY! They look a little different in the photo – lighting, different wear…but they all look great and matchy matchy in person…did I mention I’m HAPPY? Doesn’t take much…

Moving on…I’ll not bore you with going the the strip process again…just a few pics of the process – laying it out, etc…and I discovered a hole in one my shirts, which I marked to fix later.

Moving right along – here’s a shot of the seams ironed open…I turned it over and stitched about 1/8″ on both sides of the seam.  so it looks like this (ignore the waves…they’ll go away):

This is where I get a little nervous – I’ll measure all of the center column blocks and figure out how I want to center the gold blocks with those – and hopefully not forget to add my seam allowances…cross your fingers…

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Here we sew again…

Here is the center all sewn together and trimmed up, and then the surrounding rows laid out so I can see if that’s going to work out…

Ok…I think what I will do here is center the top blocks first. So I will measure the one on the center column and cut the gold one to the same size, plus my 1/4″ seam allowances.

For the second one, I want that to center with ticket block and will include the two skinny black pieces in that measurement.

And, for the third, that will center with bottom two pieces on the center row.  Probably should right down the measurements (and keep up with them) for the column on the other side…

 

Ok. Decision time…I have decided at this point, rather than add that grey strip to the bottom on the center column, that I will frame the whole thing out in grey. So, there will be that, plus the binding. Maybe adding a little unnecessary work for myself, but I’m ok with that. I’ll probably change my mind anyway….

Because I want my designs centered, I am going to fold them in half, evened up on the design, and measure/cut from there. Not a good time to ignore the Golden Rule...
Before I cut, I’m going mark where I think I’m going to cut…and line that up with my block..just in case….

The top block and the bottom block should be only 1/4 longer…for the bottom seam….the center one will be 1/2 inch longer. Confused yet? Me too…

Looks like mine is a little too big…that is likely due to the fold…I’m kind of ok with that right now…because I can shave off the extra in a bit…I’m double checking and I’m cutting…

I am ONLY cutting the top and bottom right now…which, in this case, looks like the sides…but it’s not. I will cut the sides with the other blocks. Because I want to. Quilters, don’t hate. I would not attempt that on something larger than this….ok, maybe I would…

And I am having a DUH moment…I know I need an extra quarter inch on the bottom…and I have cut that…my marks turned out to be only about a quarter inch to big…so I can cut the top 1/4 inch shorter than the bottom…measuring from the design. I think I thought of this coming into to this point, but it just came back to me…lets double check that…and go for it…

And I changed my mind…I am going to go ahead and cut the width…because I should. I know I want them to be about 11 wide, so I’m just going to grab all my blocks and make sure that s going to work…

Looks good…leaves about an inch and a half gold border on the widest grey block…so we are cutting to 11.5 inches wide for seam allowances on both sides.

Now I am going to center that up with the top block for the other gold column…and cut them the same…save some work later and I don’t have to keep up with measurements…

Shorted it a bit for the second block…but looks fine…I will just make the bottom block a little taller. Only I will know, right?

 

Ok. I am sewing all of these columns together and and adding them to center…

Easy stuff, right? Should be…seems it doesn’t Mather how much I measure, check, layout, measure, check, layout, repeat… I am destinedabout a half inch on the other. for mistakes….
I have about an inch and a half hangover on one column…

Ga. I’ll figure it out. I’m going to stick with the center columns to measure out the outer columns. It will work itself out, right? Ok. Moving on.

Here, we are laid out to figure out what to do next. My bottom blocks are pretty square and big compared to the others. , so I’m doing those like I did the others. Just to keep things consistent…

Now we have to figure out what to do with all of these random smaller pieces…I’m thinking I’ll make some long black strip blocks and just appliqué them on…might do the little chest emblems in a strip as wide as the blocks just to break things up a bit? Hmmmm…

I’ll save all those details for the next post just to keep you from losing your mind and move on to just putting the last 2 columns on…

Outer columns being put together is going much more smoothly than the gold ones...pretty much the same process – at this point, I’ve decided to hang it up on the wall – I just stuck a long strap in the wall with thumbtacks and clipped everything on with clothespins – Like this much more than spreading everything out on the floor.  Helps to visualize everything, too.

You can’t see it in the photo, but he is wearing a Vanderbilt shirt, ’cause that’s how we roll…

From this point, I got the side columns right and sewed them on, and the top is DONE.  And that just feels good – some how, I managed to not get a good shot of that, but here’s one of my elves…so that makes it ok…

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I hope you are tackling your own T-shirt quilt by now! Stay tuned and we’ll get it all put together…I keep telling my family that it’s “almost done”…CAN’T WAIT!

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Cindi

 

All done with this post…see you next time!

 

T Shirt Quilt Sew Along Part 3: Layout

Ready to sew??  Not quite yet…

First you have figure out where you are going to put everything…because once you sew those knits together – you DO NOT want to have to pick them apart…and, if you cut them, you will lose precious inches.  I made this step way more time consuming than it needed to be. Let me share with you what I did and then what I might do differently next time. And here is my favorite t-shirt.  Papa & Granny bought the t-shirt for my middle son when he was tiny, and it has been repurposed into a bag and then back into a tank top for my dauther.  So, there wasn’t much left of it.  Luckily, I was able to work it in.

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Working the layout….

I measured out all of my pieces and what I thought would make a good size square/piece from each and made notes on which ones I could cut down to a smaller size if needed…my goal was to make, at minimum, evenly measured rows and columns.  I did number each piece with it’s ‘finished’ measurement (you are cutting them 1/2 larger for 1/4 seam allowance) Because this is my first try at this, I didn’t want to try to do too much piecing. So, I spent hours trying to figure out the perfect layout to get to a good finished size.

Graph paper was very helpful…each little square would represent 4 inches in most of my drafts.

So, I got that figured out.  Then, I had the bright idea of taking pictures and seeing if I could lay them out.  That worked pretty well – I took the picture, cropped them to the portion I planned to use, and resized to scale.  It was pretty simple to move them around on a spreadsheet.  I used the Numbers app on my iPad. I liked that b/c I could easily take pictures and add them without having to go back and forth to the desktop.  That looked good – so I started laying everything out with my finished draft in hand…didn’t dig it so much…so just kind of played with everything and moved it around until I liked it.  Apparently, I wanted it to be a little more uniform and balanced than I thought. I just wasn’t crazy about all of the randomness…and, having really only 4 colors to work with, I didn’t feel like I had much choice…maybe I did…but nothing I liked…so here is what I ended up with….

 

What I will do is use one solid color for all of the background/fill in pieces on each column.  The center, I’m thinking gray – the two columns boarding the center, probably gold, and the outer columns black…because there is so much white there…may change my mind as I go.  I have plenty of grey, black, and white shirts, unfortunately, no gold ones that are workwithable…so I’ll have to hunt down some of those…

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Do as I say, not as I do…

So, what would I have done differently?  In a perfect world, and with a smarter brain, I would have kind of known what I wanted my finished quilt to look like and approximately what size I wanted the squares to be – and if I wanted them all the same or different.  I would have first measured the designs on the shirts, tagged each one with a number and finished measurement and design size.  At that point, I would choose between the graph paper and the spreadsheet – I like the spreadsheet with photos better because it gives you a visual – you don’t have worry about how you take your pictures (don’t try to take them all the same size) – once you crop and size your photos for the spreadsheet, it will work itself out.  The biggest thing here, for me, would be to NOT cut out my pieces before laying it out.  This may have saved me lots of piecing later.

And, then I would again lay them all out in according to ‘plan’ and make adjustments as needed – you may just want to have the shirt fronts (and backs if using that) already cut away from the sleeves/neck/etc….this will make it easier to overlap them and fold them, etc.

And then, start cutting…measure twice (or 3 or 4 times!) before cutting!  GOLDEN RULE…

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 Have fun! We’ll start putting it together next time!

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Sew Along T Shirt Quilt Part 2: Cut and Prep Shirts

Got everything ready?

Great! I am certain I forgot something…but we will find out soon enough, I suppose. This is one of those steps you can do quickly – so you won’t need to much time – HOWEVER – read on before you jump in – you might want to do things differently than I did…

Now, the fun part…cutting out those shirts and pressing. I made quick work of cutting out my shirts… – laid them out, cut them in a quick pass with the rotary cutter.

Keep as much of the front as you can…

I even kept the bottom snap part of this onsie…you know, just in case I make a onsie….and remember that I kept it…and where I put it…

Lay it out, cut it out. That simple. All you want to deal with right now is the front block. unless there is something on the back that you want to use in your quilt – if that’s the case, then you will want to cut down the side with scissors and cut them separately so you don’t lose something.  Save the backs and, if you are anything like me, any potentially usable scraps (sleeves, strips, hems)…for your quilt or other projects. I have some collared shirts in my pile and I love reusing the collars for waistbands. And the buttons…who doesn’t love free buttons?

Now is time to starch your shirts or add interfacing/stabilizer if you chose to go that route. I just sprayed way too much starch on mine and ironed them so they would be nice and stiff.

This a good time to measure your designs. I didn’t do this…kinda wishing I had…but I didn’t…I just laid out each shirt front and cut as big a piece as I could with measurements divisible by 2. Wish I had stayed with 4s…but I had several that just worked better with 6″ and some 2″ cuts. In hindsight, I wish I had left some extra width as well and just traced around what I thought I would use…you’ll see why later. But I’m a jump in and get it done kinda person…sometimes that’s good, sometimes I make more work for myself. So, once you are finished measuring, you can plan out your finished quilt. I cut them out already…so I’m stuck with what I got…

That’s it for this post!

A little preview of Part 3 – which I am already in the middle of – I’ll add some things I learned to this and show you some more of the process I went through, maybe save you a little work:

Quick little snapshot of my sort of planning it out – graph paper worked great, so did a spreadsheet and scaled pictures – we’ll get into that more later – just wanted to mention it in case you want to plan before cutting…in which case, you’ll want to look at Part 3 before jumping to part 2.  One of those do as I say, not as I do moments….

Here’s a snapshot of some of my planning scribble…

Now, once I was happy with that…sigh. The fun part… I had flipped some measurements and left a couple of things out…so begin again. Did a little research to see if I could find some kind of online quilt planner…because as much as I like how easy the graph paper is, I am pretty sure I would end up changing it along he way…no luck. Nothing that looked free simple enough…so I got to work on a spreadsheet app – that worked well – The pics are pretty easy to resize along the way and the table in the document easy to adjust to square sizing – but of course when I actually started laying it out, I changed the whole thing – so maybe just skip the whole planning process and spread everything out and make it up as you go?  Here’s what I have so far…

 

Happy Cutting!

Cindi