Doing It the Hard Way

I purchased a fat corner stack of Chillingsworth a while back and I wanted to use them up. So I found a really nice pattern that I thought would look good.  It was called All Inked Up by Tony Jacobson.   I revamped it to work with fat quarters. It worked out that I could cut four 9 inch blocks from each fat quarter and that I would need 12 fat quarters.  I had that.  This could work out!

When I opened the stack of Fat Quarters, what I thought was bicycles was indeed bicycles WITH SKELETONS on it!  Not what I thought it was going to be.  But then the significance of the name Chillingsworth hit me.

Honestly, I had wondered how Chillingsworth equated to bicycles when I pulled the Fat Quarter Bundle from my stash.  But I figured I just didn't know enough about bicycle history. 

 It worked out that I could cut four 9 inch blocks from each fat quarter and that I would need 12 fat quarters.  I spent some time yesterday rechecking my figures and it looked pretty good. I was ready to cut everything out.

There was an easy way I could cut them out and put them together or there was a hard way. Of course I blindly stumbled into the hard way.  Why read the instructions?  Who is this Tony guy anyway? 

It would have been so simple had I just  sewed the fat quarters together and then cut up for the black strip. I also way over estimated the number of black strips I needed so I have a lot of them left over.

A LOT.

 Luckily I have a lot of extra black on a bolt.  And I now have a lot of extra black 1 inch strips, too.

And my 9 inch blocks, turned into 8 1/2 inch blocks when I had an unfortunate trimming accident.  But I can adjust.  Yes I can!  I have to. 

Sometimes I wonder how people in traditional quilting do it.  But I am pretty sure this is how Modern Quilting got started............