SEWING ON A SUNNY DAY

After a very long winter it was nice to wake up to a sunny day.  I spent my morning at my sewing machine working on some ideas for quilts that I have been thinking about for some time.  I wanted to make a bow tie quilt with 4" blocks.  I have planned all along to make dimensional bow tie blocks, so I looked up a tutorial about how to do it. After making a few,I finally decided against it . 

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At the top of the photo are the dimensional blocks sewn together.  They are okay, but they are a hard to trim to look nice, my ruler just rocks back and forth.  they are a little to fiddly for my liking.  

Enter the easy cheater bow tie .  Really easy.  Basically a 4 patch, where a small triangle is made in the corner of the two background blocks.  I guess that if you quilted a square around the center it would look fine.  

I decided to go the traditional route. I printed out templates on EQ that would make a template that was about 1/4"  larger than I wanted my block to be.  That way, I could trim to exactly 4.5". These take a little more time. set in seams, 8 steps for each block, but it has the look that I want. Plus, I can make a block out of one charm square.  I have a bunch of those, so it will be a very lively quilt. 

I am also putting an I Spy quilt together.  I have a weakness for novelty fabrics.  Admittedly, there aren't a whole lot of things you can do with them once you buy them, but I have been cutting out hexagons for a while to make an I Spy.. Yes, I know that there are easier ways to make an ISpy, but this looks really nice.  I am putting polka dot fabrics on the end of the rows that the block is trimmed.  I didn't want to trim an image that could be 'spied'.  I envision this a future child or grandchild's 'Sick Day' quilt.  Nothing would brighten a day more than a quilt with lots of things to look at. 

Finally, this year is a decade birthday for me.  I've always wanted to make myself a letter T quilt.  I decided to make mine all polka dots.  And just so you don't think that everything I do has a black background, a neutral is being used.  Although.. I DID plan on also making this a black background. When I get started really working on this I will change the thread in my machine to match the fabric.  I was just to lazy to do it for this block.  All of this to avoid quilting this miniature for an upcoming guild show.