Watercolor Crosses

My design wall is looking oh-so-happy today. Come see!

And I have made a right mess of my sewing room. I have string scraps everywhere - blue strips stacked on the windowsill, two color bins overflowing onto the floor and another two bins overflowing onto my sewing table (not pictured). That tall fan is right behind my sewing bench, keeping me cool on this warm summer day, and simultaneously blowing blocks off my design wall to add to the confusion, haha!

But really, sewing these blocks is so zippy-quick and relaxing. There’s no wrong way to cut those improv slices. I am using a ruler to cut and working quickly and instinctively. In a jiffy a pile of ready-to-sew pieces awaits by my machine.

This wash of clear colors is lifting my spirits stitch by stitch.

Here’s a big batch of 6” finished blocks. That’s such a cute size. This time I am making blocks in the following finished sizes: 4”, 6”, 8”, 10” and 12”. Sewing them together is going to require partial seams, but that doesn’t worry me a bit. Partial seams are not as tricky as they sound, I promise.

The trick with a quilt like this is making the blocks fit together. In the beginning I arranged blocks up on the design wall, working from the center out. Now that I have made about half of the blocks, I am mocking out the rest of the quilt with blank block backgrounds. This allows me to see where I am going, so to speak, so that I make remaining blocks in appropriate colors and sizes.

Onwards!