Decisions, Decisions

First off, here's the stack of fabric strips that I'm working with for the quilt:



I needed 315 strips for the quilt top, but I definitely ended up with quite a bit more than that—I want to include a horizontal stripe of color on the back of the quilt, to tie in the color scheme and to make it a reversible quilt. I have no idea how many strips I have to work with for the back (there was really no math to the cutting process), I just made sure to cut extra pieces of each fabric as I went along. I'm hoping I have enough! Some of the pieces for the back are the same size as the ones that I'll use on the front (2.5 x 10.5 inches) and others are scraps that were left over. They are all the same height (10.5 inches), but they vary quite a bit in width. I'm not sure how it will turn out, but it should be a nice splash of color for the back. I have to add this stripe in order to disguise the fact that the material for the back isn't one continuous piece of fabric—it's too big of a quilt for me to be able to do that, so I would need to use two (or more) panels anyways. So, my goal is that this stripe of color will make the back big enough, while adding an aesthetic feature to the quilt backing at the same time.




In case you don't remember the quilt map, I have to make 63 quilt blocks that will go in 7 columns made up of 9 quilt blocks each. As of right now, I'm on column 3 of 7.... and I have some big decisions ahead of me—who knew it would be this hard to make the fabric placement look random. And because it's so hard, I don't want to sew anything together just yet. Instead, I'm laying everything out and once I can see the finished effect, I'll know if it all looks good where it's at or if colors need to move around more. While I picked out all of the fabric myself, I definitely have favorites, so I'm trying really hard not to use them too much and end up with repeated patterns in the quilt.




Last week I had some help from my friends Jessica and Maya deciding which strips should go where. It's so nice to have another opinion/perspective! I tried to trick them by saying that it was a game, but it didn't keep them entertained for very long. Once they bailed, the decision making was left to me—again—so I had to come up with a game plan! My goal for the past week has been that I try to create a block (which consists of 5 strips) every time I pass the quilt, and seeing as it's being pieced together in my living room, I thought that this would mean I would pass it a lot and it would magically come together in a weekend. Well, not so much... I'm pretty busy and only in and out of my apartment twice a day, so I don't think that my method will be fast enough. Kira's birthday is just around the corner! Which means I really need to kick it into high gear and finish laying out the whole quilt by the end of the week. Bah! We'll see...