July NewFO - "Set Sail"

Love Barbara's NewFO parties each month, and they're really helping me get these kits pulled out of stone-cold status and on their way to becoming quilts before my youngest is out of high school.  ;D  Lots of other fun projects emerging, so take a fun breakfast stroll through the other links.

July's NewFO plan was to pull Quilting By the Bay's "Set Sail" kit out of the NETY storage and get it going. And although I've been inundated with blue/white projects this year, this one still floated my boat for a summer UFO focus, so I stuck with the plan. I'm super happy with how far I managed to push this one.

The center row is finished! That's 72 inches so far. It'll be 102" square when it's complete. Even though it'll bleed into August, I want to finish the center field and encase it in the yellow stop-borders to protect all the seam ends from ravelling before I put it away to start on August's NewFO. Besides, being my birthday month, this is the one time this year I get to go SHOPPING!!!!  woohoo! So I don't yet have a projection for August's slot.  


I have 14 more base blocks to assemble, then I can put together the two side panels for the center. 





When it's finished, it'll look like this, except that there was enough fabric for me to add the flying geese on the other sides so that this will be a good size for our king bed:

I had to make 448 HSTs for this sucker.

Fastest way around to do that many with perfect accuracy is to pin the paper pattern to right-sides-together pieces of fabric and sew through all the layers. I cut the fabric pieces with only 3/16 inch leeway around the edges, and it really conserves fabric for you.

Bump your stitch length one notch smaller and tighten the tension a smidge, and you're good to go ZOOMING along the dotted lines.

After you've done that, lay a few out on your cutting mat and slice them all apart on the solid lines. Then watch a fun show while you pop the papers off (which takes far less time on a collection like this than it would take you to size the HSTs after pressing).  

You can get various Triangles-on-a-Roll papers (a nice variety available as you can see at their site - ooo! and a product like Golden Threads paper, too - I have to check that out!) or you can print out HST patterns at Block Central or Quilting and Whatnot (just be CERTAIN your printer is not set to "fit-to-paper"!!)

Not sure when I'll pull this out again and tackle the geese. I should have planned on doing those in the paper-piecing style for less intense work, but I was so focused on cutting the whole quilt out to kit it up for marination after this month's work that I just cut them all out for the 4-in-1 method.  Well, it's probably best that I did that, because although I'm super comfortable now with the paper-piecing method, and am pretty darn good at cutting pieces with minimal fabric waste, there's still a larger margin needed than the 4-in-1, and that wouldn't have let me eke out enough to add the extra sides of geese. So I guess it's all good.  :D

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You should browse through the link-up party at Barbara's - folks have got some super cool NewFO projects going!

And there's more fun at Lee's WIP Wednesday link-up!