Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Organising the leader-ender project

I'm working away at my Northwind blocks, cutting up piles of scraps and deciding on what colours to use and the best approach to using them as leader-enders.  I can get horribly confused when I'm working on two projects at once, so I needed to have some sort of a system to these blocks.
The 6" blocks are made with 2"and 4" finished triangles. Each block needs three 2" HSTs, and two dark and two light triangles.  I made sets of 5 pairs of light and dark triangles to begin with, then chain sewed the HSTs.  Once the HST seams are pressed (open in this case) I package them up with the remaining triangles for that block and they go into little ziplock bags.
These will become my leader-enders in between sewing together the Hunter's Star blocks.
When I have a fair few of the chains of triangles done I add the big triangles, and voila, a block done almost instantly.
I'm doing mainly red, brown and green scraps, with a touch of purple thrown in every now and again, just because I have the scraps there waiting to be used.
Now that I've decided on a logical way to sew these blocks I can sort all these triangles into kits and tidy up my sewing table.  I love knowing I have heaps of pieces cut and waiting to be sewn together.

I already have 26 blocks made, and I like the colour mix, so I will attack the scraps again and do some more cutting. The 2.5" triangle die I'm using needs a 7.5" strip, so I have cut up some pieces from the stash drawers as well; I'm certainly getting rid of a pile of pieces, which is what I meant to do. I'll need about 120 blocks, enough to keep me busy for a while.
Once the Hunter's Star is in one piece I can get busy working on the Checkered Lattice, I need the design wall for that so I haven't made much progress.  It's fun to be working on all these projects at once, I might even have some tops finished before the end of the year.

5 comments:

  1. That is going to be such a pretty quilt.

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  2. I love this! What a perfect leader/ender project, too. (Though I'm looking at it and thinking it's a 'drop everything and start this' kind of project) (This is why I never finish anything...)

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  3. I’ve always loved Northwind blocks and your colors are great. I’ve never wanted to mess with all the small HSTs in this block but it wouldn’t be bad with the GO cutting them.

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  4. This looks really lovely - and a bit complicated. I'm a beginner quilter and am contemplating doing my first quilt featuring triangles. Not as many as those, though!

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  5. I really love your color and pattern choices and am adding this one to this year's to do list!

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