Flying with Charlie Brown (and more life lessons)

And the task for another week of the Star Surround QAL is done!

Flying geese.

And again these are the lessons I learned from this task:

1. lesson from last week: between the different steps of the tutorial do something else :) this pushes me to have good progress also on my Peanuts/Snoopy wall hanging (!!!) so let me introduce you Charlie Brown

The pattern will be available here as soon as his friends are ready to join the party :)

2. lesson from last week: try the steps with one unit first. Which worked perfectly! I made my first 4 flying geese in a very fast and efficient way... so I got carried away by the thought "maybe I can follow the assembly line process"... and a voice in my head screamed "noooooo, don't do it, go on with this approach"... did I listen to that voice??!?... obviously no... I took 4 big squares, aligned the small squares, pinned and sew all of them... great... then I cut the them apart, I cut the diagonal line and HORROR OF HORRORS, I realized that I sew the small squares on the wrong side of the big squares!... I looked at the chain of the others squares and 3 of them were wrong in the same way!! only 1 of them was ok... and I already cut one apart!!

Have you ever had one of those moments when you want to bang your head against the wall because you didn't listen to yourself?? I had one of those... because now I had to rip 6 longs seams and two of them on triangles pieces that I had to reassemble in the right way later on...

Luckily I remembered this wonderful block

http://suleon.blogspot.de/2012/03/sew-out-loud-qal-keep-calm-block.html

I took a deep breath, I ate a small piece of chocolate and I had all those "fast" seams undone :( luckily the voice in my head was not completely ignored, and I chain-pieced only 4 squares... it could have been much worse :)

So the lesson for this week is: listen to yourself! your instinct is (most of the time) right :)


And now, I need your help!! Please!!

I just recently found some selvage blocks that I would really love to make... and I realized that I have very few nice selvage in my stash :( so I thought to organize a "Selvage for Block swap".

These are the rules:
1. if you have some nice selvage pieces and you are willing to send them to me, just drop me an email at tweloq at gmail dot com (the parts of the selvages I am looking for are the parts with the text and the ones with the circles with the colors used in the fabric... also the colorful parts of the selvage without text are ok, but I am trying to keep the look of my block uniform :) and if there is at least 1/4 of the fabric above the strip of selvage itself that would be even better... but if not, that's fine too :) )
2. in exchange for the selvage you send me, I can send you a finished block! any block you want (pretty much) :) you can choose one of my blocks, any of the Fandom in Stitches blocks, or even some more classic blocks (max size 12 inches)... I am more comfortable in doing paper piecing blocks, but I am willing to try more traditional ones too :)
3. we can agree on the block/fabric choice/etc. by email... and as soon as I receive the selvages I will make and send you the block.

I hope many of you will help me realizing my dream of a selvage quilt :) :)


Just a concluding remark about the Flying geese task: the no-waste-method is pretty quick and easy but it does not allow you to trim and straighten the final block... which means that some of mine look kind of wonky... not too much, I hope... I think some of my points will not match perfectly, but I guess it's fine. And another thing is that (as you can see in the lower left corner of my picture above) directional fabric get cut half with horizontal and half with vertical orientation... I don't know if I messed up something with the instructions but I couldn't figure out a way to do them all one way... not that it matters for my scrappy/whimsical design... but it's good to keep that in mind for my future designs (if I want to obtain a specific effect with the direction of the fabric :) )