It doesn't pay to be lazy!
Friday, June 11, 2010 at 4:20PM ;)
When I designed this quilt in EQ7, I used a single block for the entire quilt. They’re eight inch blocks, divided into sixteen squares. I just recolored the squares according to how I wanted them to look. The border blocks are simply four inch versions.
As soon as I’d finished with my design, I realized that the entire quilt would need to be redrawn with completely new blocks, otherwise it would have a gazillion pieces instead of minimizing them. For example, four of these blocks fit together to make a snowball in the center. That snowball has sixteen, two inch patches! That’s pretty silly isn’t it?
But redrawing those blocks takes some time and effort, and by golly I really just wanted to sew… plus cutting a gazillion patches is easy peasy with the AccuQuilt. So I took the lazy route, and didn’t redraw the quilt. DOH!
It may have taken a bit of time to figure out new blocks, but I would have saved countless hours piecing. I ;)
only just now finished the first border. These border would be so much quicker if they weren’t all itsy bitsy blocks… not too mention my piecing would be much nicer with fewer patches!
So this quilt is a lesson to me! Don’t be lazy! It’s just more work later! And I confess that I am not the most accurate piecer, especially when it comes to so many little patches. My top border ended up being an entire inch off… on the large side. If it weren’t for the nifty adjustable dual feed feature on my Bernina 830, I don’t know that I could have eased all that in!
Reader Comments (5)
I have a problem with that too - no matter how accurate I try to be I am off a lot of the time.
Karen
http://karensquilting.com/blog/
Love the border. I'm glad you are piecing and not me. I would be way off with those itsy bitsy pieces.
That border is really adorable though. That is the lesson to be learned....EQ7 (or any version of EQ) makes the designing so easy that you really need to think about the piecing involved and decide if you REALLY want to do that. I have designed so many quilts in EQ that I would never in a million years really want to piece. LOL. Still I love this one that you are doing. claudia
I'll tell you how lazy I am. I have the software and haven't even loaded it yet.............now THAT'S lazy.
CJ, I have to say again how much I like this new blog look. It's soft and easy on my eyes.
I'm sure it was a pain, but it sure is looking beautiful!!! Love it :) Thought of you the other night. My guild had Edyta Sitar as the guest speaker and she had the most beautiful quilts. I'm not usually a big batik fan but the way she combined them with the traditional fabrics was gorgeous and just the colors you and I always gravitate towards :) Of course, I bought another pattern, LOL.