Today's quilt is called "Baby Pastel 5-patch Quilt."
Yesterday, water came up through the floor in the entrance, where I had stored thousands of small squares, and everything was from wet to damp, so I baked them for 10 minutes on 3 trays to dry them out. It worked, with no damage or smells in the fabrics! Yea!
Today, did what I had to do--cut white strips into small squares and divide out the pile of 600 different prints in just one of the stacks into color groups, then divide those out into pastels suitable for a baby quilt.
I didn't quite finish 6 squares like I'd hoped, but in 7 hours, three of the pastel squares sewn into 12.5" blocks and 3 didn't quite get to that point before one o'clock. *sigh* It was total fun, though. Each block is like putting together a puzzle. It didn't start that way, but in the green fabrics, I noticed there was an Irish derby right dead center on in the square, so I decided to place it in the center and the rest just came together. Nothing much special about the lilac and yellow bordered squares, except that I had a lot of "unsewing" that needed to be done when squares didn't match up just so. That went on until I finally got the hang of doing a better job.
It always pays to do one sample block first if you haven't done a certain square for a long time or if it's your first time with a certain pattern. It gives you a ballpark idea of what to expect, and the mistakes you make are ones you will surely avoid thereafter. Quilting is good for your math. It makes you a mathematician, whether you wish to be one or not. That seems to me to be why a lot of quilters who visit quilt stores are mathematicians and women in the sciences--math teachers, lab technicians, physicians, and nurses, not to mention rancher women who have to prepare formulas for sick animals, measuring exactly; cooks, statisticians, and bookkeepers. It's all math sometimes. It just is. Of course, some people like color so much and are so right brained it's "hooch and scooch city" to make blocks match. This crowd is the one that jumps in the water first without looking, and winds up in a cast all summer, the one who runs the fastest around the track first day out, then doesn't want to do track anymore, because she busted her buns, and the artist that hates math, just wants to do their own thing, oh, well, if things don't match, do a picasso with the damn thing and turn it into a canvas.
People quilt for a lot of reasons, but those who piece and try to match corners, they are the faithful of the math community, and their quilts generally take "judge's choice" for excellence, when a frivolous artist who breaks all the rules and comes up with the most unique quilt anyone ever saw, does not enter for some reason.
Oh, yeah. The "I haz a happy" Baby pastel 5-patch Quilt, blocks 1, 2, and 3:
