This looks unimpressive, but here are 16 (pressed!) blocks for Mom & Dad’s quilt.
I’ve got 4 brown ones, 6 aqua ones, and 6 cream/light brown ones. The next step is to CHOP THEM UP AGAIN. That is the most depressing part of the Disappearing Nine Patch quilt (well, mostly it’s the ironing you have to do as a result of that) - you divide these blocks into quarters, twist two parts, and then sew them back to together. Frankenquilt-style. This will all become clearer in Progress Report #4, I hope.
The other part I worked on was figuring out how to lay out these 16 blocks into a 4×4 grid that 1) won’t have any two blocks of the same color touching, and 2) doesn’t look like ass. Guess which one of those criteria is easier?
I broke out a spreadsheet, ya’ll! With conditional formatting! And CountIf functions! Which just goes to prove you can’t take the geek out of the girl, much less get her away from the computer long enough to finish a quilt on time.
I’m throwing this up here in case my parents want to weigh in on the layouts. I kind of think the top layout is a bit cliche - brown cornerstones! I like the middle one because it’s got a bit of pinwheel action going on with the symmetry. And the bottom one has some symmetry on the diagonal, but not so much it’s overwhelmingly swoopy.
My technical terms, let me show you them.
In other news, I finished the quilt for the Good Mews Kitty Kegger. Here it is:
(that’s Brief holding it up, as it turned out (AGAIN) a bit bigger than anticipated. Eh. Consider that extra bit for the cats to sit on.) The feature fabric has cartoon cats frolicking with bugs. Sadly, it’s not true-to-life and there are no spare cricket legs or moth wings laying about on the ground. But it’s DONE. And to that I say Huzzah!