Thursday, December 26, 2013

Celtic Solstice: Weeks Two, Three, and Four

Having now completed my Buddy-the-Elf I-got-a-full-forty-minutes-of-sleep! phase of the year, which included an unscheduled 500-mile drive to Pennsylvania for a really terrific family holiday and a football game (of all things), I actually have a few moments to try to catch back up with the Bonnie Hunter mystery quilt. It feels like the pieces are absolutely microscopic, but I think it's going to be a pretty neat quilt once it's all together.

The Week Two chevron units were devilishly grueling. Most of the time that it takes to cut 600 pieces involves ironing the heap of jumbled bits that are tossed into my color-sorted scrap bins. This is what the bins look like when I start:
Blech.
It took forever to tame the scraps into these little bits.
The directions for piecing these chevrons were very easy to follow, but the season being what it is, I only finished piecing and pressing the seams just this morning. I suppose they do look different than flying geese, but it bothered me that there was so much fabric waste. I will be interested to see the finished pattern so I can think about why they were pieced thusly instead of as twin sets of flying geese, which I can make with no waste.
Does it really matter??
Anyone want a pile of tiny triangles?



Finished chevron units. They're pretty, but time-consuming.
The Week Three diamonds didn't take nearly as long, although the Pittsburgh trip kept me from doing them right away.
Finished pinwheel units.
The fourth set of directions came out just before the final gift-stitchery weekend, so she made it pretty easy. Four patches? No problemo! These went together so quickly that I had time to catch up on the chevrons and finally take photos to get this post up for the Link-Up before the next set of directions is posted tomorrow.
120 four-patch units.
I love how all the colors of all these tiny pieces look stacked in their UFO box:
The collection of all the bits so far looks like a box of candy!

Math geekery: We need 625 3" units to make a 75 x 75" quilt. So far we have 96+92+100+50+120=458, which leaves 167 more units (although some of that area could be borders, which would throw off my calculations). What will tomorrow bring??

2 comments:

  1. Your pieces all look gorgeous! Well done catching up in time for the next clue.

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  2. I like the Steak of Lightening border idea you made with the chevrons. (I hadn't thought about making 2 Flying Geese instead of the chevrons. Hmmm, Bonnie's pressing directions do facilitate meshing of seam allowances if the chevrons are used for a border.) Thanks for figuring out the math - it's nice to know that there are only 167 more units we have to make :-)

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