bluemeadowdesigns

Back to the Ocean

Did I find my way back to the ocean? Nope, I just worked my way back to the Ocean Waves project that is lurking in my studio. (In case you don't realize where we live - we are geographically as far away from any ocean as you can get)

But many of you have been asking about this project, and now that I have cleared up the 'technical difficulty' I can show you the progress.

I wasn't able to piece the Ocean Waves quilt with our Cape Cod fabric line, but it was a quilt that I really, really, really wanted to make. So I decided to make it using fabric from my stash, and donate the top to the MCC quilt room in Ephrata, Pa.

I dug through my gi-normous stash, and picked out 12 pink and green prints. And I decided that I wanted the background to be a mix of ivory and white prints. Here's the best part! In my stash, I had a collection of 12" strips of ivory and white that I had never used. My actual intent of those fabrics was to make a wedding quilt for myself. Why did that never happen? Because I had so many idea's that I could never decide on a final quilt layout! So these fabrics have been patiently sitting in my stash for 10 YEARS! But since they are good quality cotton, they look as good today, as they did a decade ago when I first bought them.

And have you ever noticed that when you use up a fabric out of your stash, it releases a little of your pent up guilt, and you are free to go out and buy more fabric? Anyway, on to the instructions.

I was a little leary of using the 'grid' method in constructing the blocks. When I first tried it years ago, I over gridded, and over sewed those grids, and the result was a handful of tiny-tiny half square triangles. I decided that I would never teach this method, because if you don't have both eyes on the project, you can make a mistake.



Here you can see how you layer a 12" piece of print and a 12" piece of background, with the right sides facing each other. You only need to mark the grid on the back of one of the fabrics.

(Yes mother, I do realize that I didn't press my fabric before marking my grid and sewing!)



You simply sew on each side of the diagonal lines. DO NOT sew on each side of the horizontal and vertical lines...trust me...this would be a mistake.

Once you have sewn on each side of the diagonal lines, you can cut the blocks apart, by cutting along all of the drawn lines, the horizontal, the vertical, and the diagonal lines.

This method is so quick and easy that in a very short time, you will have all of the half square triangles that you need.

I must admit, years ago I probably would have cut all of the 1152 triangles, and joined them up one at a time, but now that I have gotten over my fear of the grid method, I will never go back.

I hope to finish up the 48 blocks before the end of the year, and then decide what to do with the borders. I will post a picture of the finished quilt top before I send it away.

And this is the project that I made up years ago from that handful of tiny-tiny half square triangles. I refused to admit that I had made an error in my execution of the grid method, so I simply created this small table center from that mess, and I named it 'I don't make mistakes'

-myra