My Children In Publication

My children entered a Christmas tree decorating contest last year and won best collaborative effort. That won them three hand-decorated canvas bags that they carry their scriptures to church in every week. It also got their pictures in this month's Mary Jane's Farm Magazine which should be on stands now.

Sorry; the photos in the magazine looked better, I just don't have good lighting anymore today. The photos I took earlier while sewing are better; I will post them later. This is what my children looked like a year ago when they entered the contest.

Two Seams Down

I have sewn two of the three main seams on all of those cathedral windows blocks I showed in the last post. The blocks are actually white, I am just playing with photos the last few days to see what I can do.

Start of Cathedral Windows Quilt

start of cathedral windows quilt, originally uploaded by sunshine's creations.

472 blocks (9 1/2 inches square), I'm not sure how many I will need for the actual quilt. It is somewhere around 600 and 700, so this won't be enough for it but it is a good start. Now I need to start the other pieces of fabric that will fit inside of these once they are folded. This stack represents 6 hours of cutting fabric. I can't believe how much it weighs, and I have yet to cut the color pieces that go into the quilt.

Since it took 6 hours to do 2 blocks (which are sets of 4 squares), I have been doing some math -- that would be 3 hours per block set. Also, I still have to cut the filler blocks which, because they will be from scraps, will take about 10 times longer than the white which was from yardage, so 60 hours there. So take 472 squares /4 squares per block=118 blocks *3 hours per set of blocks = 354 hours + 60 hours color squares + 6 hours yardage squares = 420 hours minimum to make this, and probably 7 times that to do it by hand instead of machine (354 * 7 + 66 = 2544 hours) .

If I worked on it 4 hours a day, every day (which is impossible because I have a family and job), it would take an estimated 15 weeks by machine and about 91 weeks by hand, or more. I think this is the definition of insanity, and I guess I like that type of insanity, sort of. There is no way I can take on any project for that long of a time, so I expect this will go into hibernation and out of it, several times.

I am hoping that assembly line techniques like chain sewing and things of that sort speed this up a ton; I will keep you informed.

As I get farther into this, I will post a tutorial.

1, 2, 4

The butterfly girl went to school yesterday missing 1 tooth, came home missing two. Went to school today missing two teeth (I posted this morning about it). Then, she came home missing 4 teeth. My husband told her if she keeps loosing her teeth like that he won't let her have any more (ha ha). I am just curious -- how is she going to eat anything?