Craft Day

I LOVE CRAFT DAY.  I also love the girlfriend who suggested it.  I have a couple of mommy friends who are also crafty, but being a stay-at-home mom means you don't have a lot of disposable time on your hands.  So, when one of my friends asked if I wanted to have a craft day, I said YES.  At the time, all our babies were on the same nap schedule, so the plan was for all of us to meet at someone's house, enjoy some pizza, put the babies down for nap and enjoy our two hours of chore-free craft time.  Everyone brings their own thing to work on.  We kept it up weekly for a while, but schedules and changing nap patterns got the best of us.  We still get together periodically, and when I got a text right after New Year's asking if I was up for a craft day, I said YOU BET.

So today we enjoyed an All the Meats from Papa John's and a solid two hour nap from the kiddos.  I got a lot of pieces cut for daughter's quilt, and I think I'm about halfway done.  Rotary cutters are awesome.  Even better are the thick plastic templates that help keep lines straight and shapes all squared up.  I'm especially fond of the Fons & Porter 6x6 Square Up Ruler that I picked up a few weeks ago.  I figured I needed it after none of the seams in my first quilt lined up.  I'm glad I got it, because it made this job a lot easier:

I finished my calculations last night and determined that the basic repeating shape for my quilt would be a 3" square.  This means I have to cut 3.5" squares.  No problem, especially since the other template I have is 3.5" wide and I can run strips quickly.  However, the fabric in the picture above was not as easy to cut as I planned.  The quilt design I'm using has a diagonal setting, but I want the stripes in this fabric to be vertical in the finished quilt.  AND I want them to line up.  After messing up several squares last night by trying to cut 3.5" strips, I realized each one was going to have to be cut individually if I wanted the center stripe to go straight down the middle of each piece.  I now fully understand the meaning of the term "fussy cut," even though it usually applies to a much larger floral print.

The fussy cutting also threw a kink in my math.  I bought four yards of this fabric (again, don't buy fabric without a Plan), but I knew I couldn't have it all sitting on the table while I cut tiny squares off one end.  So I did some geometry to figure out what length of 44" fabric would give me 56 3.5" diagonally set squares (The answer is 17.3" - I guess I owe my geometry teacher a thank you)  So I cut a 19" piece to be safe and it all would have been fine except that the blasted stripes are a half an inch too far apart for it to work out properly.  So the 19" piece of fabric I took to craft day only yielded 45 or so squares and I'm going to have to cut another hunk off the big fabric piece.  Not a big deal, I have plenty :)

Next steps: continue knitting the scarf as time allows and cut more squares during naptime.