animal parts

No hammocks this week and it feels wierd.  My go-to in the sewing room for months and months has been hammocks.  I'm in a lull - I have a batch finished, but am waiting a bit to turn those in and ask for more fabrics.  I feel like I need to get some sewing of my own done for a bit!

I worked some on tiger parts.  It never looks like much, but I think I'm down to 49 sections to go.

I don't think that bottom row of parts is quite matched correctly to the upper row, but you get the idea.  I have a few sections to do the upper right side of his forehead and then just his ears before it's just background plants again to the end.  I finally feel like I'm making progress, but it's slow going with some of those sections - lots of pieces.

I also waited patiently for the quilt along to start on Friday before digging into the birds.

Really, though, I did spent some time cutting MORE pieces, as I realized there was a "bed-size" (about 80x80) option the designer provided on her blog, which is a better size for our couch, never mind the beds.  It required 11 more birds, so I went back and cut more of everything.  Except I was out of green, so I added another close match.  And then I was out of yellow, so another close match.  It's okay.  It was going to be scrappy-looking anyways, so a few extra fabrics isn't bad.  (And hooray for more stash reduction!)

The assignment for this week was all the half square triangles that make up what I'm calling "clouds".  They're basically background filler and that's fine.

The sewing didn't take long, as the pattern had us making eight at a time.  That's all well and good, but when they're not all the same fabric and each block takes three, but you can make eight at once...well...math...

The pressing and trimming, however, took much longer.  Good thing I have trusty podcasts to keep me entertained - and distracted!

These were overly big, which wasn't a huge problem, but I could probably have cut the initial square a bit smaller and had less excess to trim off.  I suppose in the end, it wouldn't have saved much fabric, so it's all good.

As I was trimming, I sorted them into piles of three, thinking I would keep the clouds all the same in each block, and this would make the end sorting process easier.

Finn agrees.

The next four weeks, we'll be making a quarter of the birds each week.  Which means I cannot mass-produce parts and then mix and match bird parts like I would normally do.  So I crawled around on the floor a while yesterday and mixed and matched parts to be sure I had one of each color for each bird part.  (And it turns out I'm bad at math because I had to get up a few times and cut a piece or two more, but that's better than finding out later, right?)

To keep them all straight, I employed the old paper plate method...

They're leaning a bit here because one side of the stack is thicker than the other, not because gravity is broken.

I ended up mixing and matching the half square triangles.  When I went to bed Saturday night, after trimming them all, I started thinking about how maybe scrappy clouds would look better.  Sunday morning, the idea still seemed like a good one, so I went with it.  The colors are random (though selected from the piles methodically to be sure things were mixed up fairly well and I didn't end up with just 13 yellows at the end or something), but they're all on the plates with the bird parts.

Also, you may notice a big "L" there on the top plate.  There are right-facing and left-facing birds, so I made sure that the body parts were fairly evenly distributed between that designation as well.

This effort may make it harder to get the random look when I'm laying out the blocks, but I'll deal with that problem when I get there.  (But truly, this is going to look quite scrappy, so it should be fine.)

The next step doesn't start until Friday, so I'm going to work on tiger parts again this week.  I'd like to see them all done this week, but I know that's a bit ridiculous considering how bored of them I get after just a few.  Never say never, though, right?

Happy quilting!

Katie