Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Crafty Math

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Have you ever dreamed of a craft project?  A few nights before Christmas, I dreamt of this quilt.  There was a little boy with curly blonde hair and blue eyes wrapped up in it, sitting in some green grass, grinning.  And that was it. 

Of course, after I got my sewing machine I had to make this quilt - though I've never quilted before and have very little idea of what I'm doing.  I bought the basic materials to make the top - yellows and oranges for the center of the flowers,  and blue for the background, and different prints for different flowers. I even nominated fabric from my gigantic stash of fabric to serve as flowers.

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Today, I sat down and drew out templates, deciding how big my pieces will be.  I want to make a queen-sized quilt, so I'll need a lot of fabric.  I don't have all the stuff I need (batting, or backing, for example) but I figured this is going to be a long project, so I can buy more stuff as I need it.  No point in spending mucho dollars on something I won't use for ten or eleven months, I thought.

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Yes - I bet understand quilting takes a lot of time. I thought about this as I hunched over on the floor of my childhood bedroom and measured and cut.  Hey, maybe I should cut all of the pieces first, that seemed to be a methodical way of doing things.

So I took out my paper and pencil, and did some calculations.

To make a 100x100 quilt, I will need:
40 edge pieces
100 center peices (the center of the flower)
80 petal pieces

That's not hard math. That's 220 squares!  I'm a little intimidated.  I think the actually sewing is going to be a ways off, while I contemplate how I'm going to tackle this task. I think it's kind of funny that I decided to do this quilt with squares with a ten inch diagonal, instead of squares with a 5 inch diagonal, which was my other idea. That would be even more squares!

3 comments:

  1. Ooooooh that's shiny! I really want to get good at sewing, but without a machine that's kinda hard. I might start doing little things that can be hand made though. For now I'll stick to knitting at forcing myself to attempt crochet.

    Okay...so in your "link within" thingy it has the "Weekend of buying lots of pointless things" post and it reminded me, I never got those sticker thingies you sent me. Did my address not work or something? Just curious. Not like my life depends on stickers! xD

    Good luck with quilting! Hope to see your progress!

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  2. I'll be eagerly watching your progress, no matter how long it takes. I think I'll take a quilting class from my local craft store when I have a minute because I'd be beyond lost trying to figure it all out.

    I hope it lives up to your dream!

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  3. Whoohoo! good luck with the quilt - interesting story about the design appearing in your dreams! I hope it turns out super pretty!

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