Cutting out pieces

I've been pretty poorly for the last few days because naughty Muv has given me her cough. To normal people a cough is nothing much to worry about, but when you team it with ME/CFS it is an absolute misery. All my symptoms have flared up in a rather dramatic way so I have been spending a lot of time in bed in a lot of pain and unable to do much apart from nap and maybe read a book.

Luckily, before the cough reared it's ugly head, I managed to get a bit of quiltyness in! I've had the fabric for this one for a little while now and wasn't really sure what to do with them (apart from knowing who the quilt would eventually be for). I finally settled on quite a simple plan for this one. As there are four different prints in four different colours, I will make small squares out of 4 strips and then make those smaller squares into larger ones so that all 16 fabrics are included in each square.

It took quite a bit of maths for me to work out the size of the strips (when my brain isn't working due to the ME/CFS maths can be quite a struggle!) and I eventually settled on strips that were 1 3/4" wide and 5 1/2" long to make 5 1/2" squares when 4 are joined together. So I set about cutting them out. I had worked out I needed 36 strips of each fabric. In my calculations I had used 18" x 22" as the size of the fat quarters (information I found online somewhere). Unfortunately that included the selvage along one edge, so where I had worked out I could get 4 5 1/2" strips from the 22" long section, I could actually only get 3!

AAH! Panic set in at this point as I had cut out 2 whole pieces of fabric before I realised! I set it all aside for a while as I needed to have a think about what to do. I knew I could make 30 of the big squares instead of 36 but that would shrink the size of the quilt by quite a lot and I am determined not to make anymore quilts that are too short! Eventually I managed to work out that I could make the strips 1 5/8" wide and 5" long. So I got to work and soon had all the fabric cut into lovely little piles of strips ready to be sewn :)

I had bought the fabrics as bundles from Fabric Rehab but in the bundles there was a different print included in the purple pack than in all the others, so I had ordered another one of the sketch fabrics from them to try and get them all the same pattern. I wasn't really happy with it though as I had to get a pink one rather than purple as they didn't have it (which is obviously why there was a different one in the purple bundle). After I had cut them out I was looking around online and found a purple version of sketch at Backstitch and was overjoyed! I ordered it on the 18th and it arrived here on the 19th! Amazing service! They have lots of lovely fabric that I wish to own as well so I'm pretty sure I will be back there soon! I haven't yet cut out the purple sketch so the photo has the pink one rather than the purple.