Ice Pops quilt, moving along.

 

When I'm not having fun on my new amazing spinning wheel, or blending fibre on my new amazing carder Noodle bought for me for christmas, I work on the Denyse Schmidt Ice Pops quilt that I started forever ago.
Working on a template quilt has been both fun and frustrating.  Cutting and prepping a template quilt is really, not so fun.  First, there's blowing the template up 4x, getting it printed and cutting each piece out.  Then there's glueing all the cutout strip template pieces to bristol board, about 26 individual template strips.  Then...  again, the pieces must be cut out again.  All of this cutting has to be exact and since it's a template quilt, you have to make sure you're not shaving millimetres off here and there or else your squares will be off later on.  THEN..  starts the cutting of the fabric.  I hate cutting more than 4 layers at once, so there's alot of cutting to do.  28 blocks x 13 strips to each block.  They're pretty big blocks too, almost 2 feet long x 3/4 foot wide.



I was done cutting almost a year ago, and ever so slowly i've been chain sewing the blocks up until about a month ago, when i went on a bender and finished up all of the blocks!  It feels good to have them done, but obviously there's just so much more to do.  I have to now square off each block, arrange them for a nice quilt top, sew the blocks together, cut and sew a border to bring it up to king size, cut, piece and sew a backing and binding, and then the quilting.  I'm thinking that I'll go get it long arm quilted at a shop, because well, I've had the pleasure/displeasure of hand quilting, and although I really do love doing it, I can't fathom how long it'll take to hand quilt a king size quilt and I can't fit a king size through my sewing machine despite how new and sparkly it still is. 

some BlockB's




some BlockA's



I bought Boo Davis' Dare to be Squre quilt book and have to totally recommend it!  It has SO many great projects in it, and the best part, no template quilts.   I already have my eye on making the owl quilt.  So cute!   After that, I have plans to do another denyse schmidt quilt, because despite what i've been saying about template quilts, they do carry a certain quirky uniqueness that i love since the very nature of them are un-structured.