Sunday 1 May 2011

What a difference a week makes!

Wow, I've made some real progress with the Sunshine and Shadow this week.

Last week, I had just finished cutting the fabric into strips. The guidance in the book was to piece all the strips together, join them into a tube, then cut strips across the width of the tube and unpick one of the joins where the edge of the block would be. I gave this a go, but I found it was really difficult to cut the tube of fabric straight, and ended up with some fairly wonky strips. Next time round, I decided to join all the strips into one piece of fabric, but not join together into a tube, then just cut into strips across the full width (slightly awkward, as my mat is only 24" long, while the pieced fabric is about 26" wide, so I can't cut in one go).


Once cut, I stitched the free ends together, to form the tube, and unpicked one seam to form the edge.

I pieced the strips into pairs, then the pairs together to form blocks 4 deep. I'm not going to sew them any bigger than that until I'm ready to piece the whole top.

I'm quite surprised how quickly it's come together. This is how far I've got in a week -


Not quite a quarter of the way yet, but pretty close.

I'm really enjoying working on this. The colours are lovely.