Around The World Quilt

 See this picture? Ignore it. Okay, maybe not completely but don't look too careful because I've noticed that I don't have the strip sections laid out in the correct order. Some of them need flipped. Take only from this picture that there are four sections.

The above oops is what happens when you are watching your three year old grand daughter and she is having one of those out of sight and quiet is a very bad thing days. She played hide and I seek every few minutes in an attempt to keep things whole. Yup, she was in to everything, I even found her trying to haul off the lap top computer. I swear she was only out of sight for only a minute. LOL

Then there was the episode of wetting on Grandpa's bed. She was watching her favorite horsey show on Netflix on Grandpa's computer. We are potty training you see. That didn't go too well either yesterday, even though we read and read stories while she sat upon her thrown, the toilet. In turn, when ever I had to go, we removed her little donut seat from the toilet and she insisted on reading to me as I went, so it wasn't all bad. She is such a cute little pot licker.

 For the day, I decided to bring my sewing machine up from the basement laundry room and put it on the kitchen table, a handier spot to run off from every two minutes to check up on missy mischief. I badly needed a down project after building fence all day yesterday with hubby. The yaks are thrilled with their new pen and now they have a big shed, really important with this early warm weather and they still wearing their full winter coat. Jasmine hasn't quit telling of her joy. She runs and bucks and then comes over to the fence to grunt at me. No, yaks do not moo, they grunt. We need to start combing then so we will set up a lane this weekend into the squeeze chute.

So a low energy activity was all this lady could muster and I badly need to sew some quilts. The grand kids's beds never did have enough twin quilts and so there are several double sized quilts folded in half on the beds. I was able to get a few made in the last couple years but that isn't enough.

Wasn't such a big deal until now. The two older grand daughters are large enough that when they toss and turn, they toss the folded over quilts right off them. Add to that, that the kids have just about worn out and toes are about to be expose from too short nap blankets and you have a real quilt shortage, twin bed size, shall child nap blankets, and baby blankets too.

The pressure is on to get a sewing. Not a bad thing to do as I'm afraid this might be a long hot summer. I'm seriously thinking of putting tomatoes out in the garden in wall a waters next week. I've got lots to spare in the basement if they don't make it.

So after pondering on the fact for a day and staring at this fabric our three year old chose from a pile of flannel in the basement, I decided to do an Around The World Quilt. Strip quilting is fast, really fast. Can't find the booklet with the instructions but I've a good idea of what they say since I've made several, years ago.

Saturday while I rested, set to work cutting strips. I chose five inches wide by the 45 inches length as that is the max my long ruler will do. Too little a pieces and it will slow way down the project and require far more fabric. It isn't as if I can run to the store for more since this is from my stash in the basement. I cut out strips from four different coordinating colors.

And now that I've been a yammering on for ever, you will need to see the picture again. I laid the strips out in order of butterflies, green, yellow with purple dots, and purple, ending with the starting color of butterflies sewing the strips together with a 1/4 inch seam.

 The next strips began with the color after the butterflies which is green and then I ran in the order of the first quilt ending in green, the starting color.

 Taking the next color of yellow with purple spots I again went in the original order but ended with the same color and the first one. Think you will get confused? Hint, cut little pieces of each fabric and tape them on to a piece of paper in order. No first and last color being the same for this is the reference piece. The last strip block in this series being the purple strip first and last.

I then sewed with a 1/4 inch seam these long 45 inch strips, which are the width of the material. Next, I laid my sewn strips with them running horizontally or from left to right. With my wide straight quilting ruler lain vertically, I cut down slicing the 45 inch strips into 3 1/2 inches wide. Then carefully handling the strips, I placed them in an order creating a half a diamond shape with each color lining up. This is the top half.

I started in the center again for the bottom half. I could have chosen to cut my pieces 5 inches wide and the whole thing would be square but I prefer the elongated look.

 Matching up seam, sorta kind of, this being the part I'm not as good at,(could be the imperfection of cutting the strips out hm...) I sewed together the multi-colored strips. Notice how much narrower the sewn bottom half is to the unsewn top. That is why I chose to cut my pieces larger to start with. You loose a lot of size using small pieces. They look great but require more fabric and lots more sewing time and thread.

I'm in a hurry and larger pieces take up more space in a hurry. A few of the seams tried to come apart on me and had to be re-sewn but surprisingly, the unbackstitched ends hold pretty good. I back stitched over every seam to re-enforce them as after all this will be a nap quilt for our youngest grand daughter and three year olds aren't terribly gentle. I did not surge the seams as I will stitch in the ditch which keeps the fabric from moving and the edges from fraying.

 All these seams narrows the quilt top by quite a bit as you can see from the unsewn top half and the sewn bottom half.

The top and bottom are not together at this point and this quilt will have borders but I was pleased with the look so far, so was our grand daughter. Besides this partially finished nap quilt top, I also had enough strips to put together a baby quilt top. The center diamond being purple instead of green.

After all, we will have a new little grand daughter coming home from the hospital in a few weeks. Our preemie grand daughter is doing well and is weighing in at 5 pounds 3 ounces now. I can't wait until we can hold her and bring her home from the hospital. Till then, I had better get the quilt her mother started done as she had no time with running back and forth between her children at home and the hospital 40 miles away.

This is instructions on making this quilt from the Internet as I've rushed through my explanation. http://www.ehow.com/how_2343553_trip-around-world-quilt.html

When you are done reading, head on over to  http://thecalicobush.blogspot.com/ and see what I'm knitting. But if you are really fast you'll have to give me just a moment to get the blog post up. Yes, I worked on the blogs last night but fell asleep before I was done. It was a busy, long day.