Thursday, July 11, 2013

Fifty More!

 No, I'm not talking about 50 more adorable pictures of my sweet Quilting Supervisor, although he certainly wouldn't mind posing for that many!

I'm talking about progress on the pinwheels, of course.

I now have the first 100 rectangles sewn to the pinwheel squares. I even laid out a block to see how it would work, but of course I took the picture with my phone and can't get it uploaded here.

Yet.

I'll figure it out, I'm sure. It just struck me funny when I typed that sentence--"I took the picture with my phone."

Okay, I'm old. I grew up when phones were black rotary jobs that were hard-wired into the house, and had party lines that were shared among three or four families. We had a distinctive ring--ours was two short--so we wouldn't pick up someone else's calls.

My grandmother didn't have a phone of her own for a long time. She'd use ours if she needed to make a call--or, a lot of the time, she'd ask my mom to make the call for her. Grandma was functionally bilingual, but she didn't always trust her English when it came to talking to bureaucrats. Or people who talked fast. 

Anyway, I learned to take pictures on my grandpa's camera, which was the kind you had to load the film into in a dark room. I think my brother still has that camera. My first very own camera was a Brownie Hawkeye with a flash attachment. I used it for a long time; it took really good pictures. But the flashbulbs were expensive, and so was developing.

So nowadays I have a digital camera, and my smartphone takes pictures, and so does my iPad, and I don't have to think twice if I want a picture. And if it's a crappy photo, I can delete it and take another one till I'm happy with it. 

Oh yeah, I like these modern times just fine!

I can take cute pictures of my cat, and put them up on the interwebs for all of you to see, and I can share the progress of my Pinwheel quilts too.

The last picture here is my latest string of piecing. I counted out the rectangles as I was cutting them, putting them into stacks of 50--if you look really closely at the top left of the picture, you can see all those little stacks of white. Those are the rectangles. The box holds one set of "spinners" and the others are those stacks of blocks in the middle. So I can grab one stack of 50 rectangles, sew them to a series of blocks, and then I'm cutting them apart and stacking them in 50s. Once I get the first 3 sets done, I could start adding the yellow center squares if I want to. I may just try to get all the rectangles sewn to all the spinner squares first, and then I'll be able to assemble all the blocks at once.

Still thinking about whether I want to do 600 and put those three quilts together, or just go ahead and do all 1200 at once. Since there's no real pressure on me to finish these, I think I'll just see what kind of mood I'm in when I'm sewing.

Meanwhile, there are a LOT of sashing strips to cut. I've got a lot of 2.5" cornerstones cut, and I didn't count them--I figure if I wind  up with extras, I can always use them in another project, right? After all, some of the stores are selling bundles of 2.5" squares in different fabrics.

No, I haven't bought any. I can cut my own!!

2 comments:

Lee I said...

Have you ever ended up one short of your plain squares at the end of the 50? Yup. Somewhere along the line, you find two plain squares attached to one of the pinwheel blocks. Not a tragedy, but a bit of exasperation.

Elysbeth said...

Many moons ago I was the girl that sat in the drive up film developing booth where you would drop off your film & come back in 2 days for the pictures.