March UFO completed

I finished this UFO last night - well technically this morning - the last day of March! The challenge was to finish the top, but when I started out, I had no idea it was going to look like this. The pieces were originally going to be part of a different top that was from an online mystery quilt project. I took all of my one inch strips and a few 1 1/4 inch strips and sewed them together into long strips of four strips each. Then the next step, which I undid (I hadn't got too far with it), was to join the strips with the same amount of solid fabric and cut them into squares with the strippy strip on the diagonal. I had done this with one set of strips and stopped there because I didn't like the way it looked. Then it sat in the UFO box for a few years. I decided to make a hidden wells pattern out of it. I've made a couple of hidden wells quilts from the Mary Ellen Hopkins instruction sheet, and it's a great pattern. But this one was a real challenge. It was much harder than I anticipated. I worked on it almost daily for a couple of hours each time.

Roman Square Project

The blocks in this layout measure six 1/2 inches square. There are fourteen sets of fifteen blocks each. This will become six 5 x 7 block comfort quilts for cancer patients. Each quilt will have a six inch border and be just wide enough so that the backing doesn't have to be pieced.

I think my plan is going to be successful. These blocks took no time at all to piece, as long as I paced myself - a new skill that I am learning! Each set of blocks used 12 1/2 inches of three fat quarters. That was the goal - to use up fat quarters in an appealing and productive way.

March UFO challenge

This small quilt will have six of these blocks across and down. I am reusing strips from a project I started about eight years ago. I figure if I piece four of the blocks at a time (four shown here), nine times, and sew the blocks to each other as they are completed, I should finish by the end of the month. These four are not quite together yet - I ran out of time.

Why I've Not Been Quilting

Here is one of the pictures I drew for the scenery for the musical play "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change," performed by a community theater group. It is the Massachusetts State House in Boston. You can see some other ones at my Picasa Web Album. I have been a theater volunteer at the Center for the Arts in Natick for a few years now, most of the time providing props, but once in a while working backstage. This particular play requires eighteen scene changes on a stage with no curtain, so I've been working really hard. But quilting will begin in earnest now because my March UFO is going to take me at least twenty hours of work.