Celtic Solstice Part 2

Well I'm a little late on this since the Celtic Solstice link-ups are on Mondays, but I prefer to take my time with each clue.  This way when I finish up on Thursday I'm not left twiddling my thumbs until the next clue comes out on Friday!

A word on my fabrics (actually a mini rant!). I bought most of the fabrics for this quilt from Joann's. Since I don't know whether I will like it and what I will do with it, I didn't want to spend a ton of money on fabrics. Every time though, I get a little frustrated. In this case, I bought a lot of skinny quarter yard cuts for that "scrappy" look Bonnie's quilts go for. In trying to square these guys up, I found that each was off by on average an inch. The worst was off by about 3 inches..ouch! At one point I just stopped squaring up the fabric because I was losing so much in the process.  I think part of the problem is the time pressure they place on the people at the cutting table. Also making them cut with scissors instead of a rotary cutter. But it is definitely frustrating to come home and lose so much of your fabric due to poor cutting.

And these are four fat quarters, all from Joann's. These guys come to the store prepackaged from factories, so you would think they would be cut correctly.  Can you see how far off from each other they all are?  Pretty nuts.

Back to the mystery.  Here is a shot of my finished blocks from part 1. My camera was giving me such a hard time that I started taking ipad photos. The quality isn't great but at least they aren't blurry and I can get pretty accurate colors. After mistakenly cutting yellows instead of pinks (pinks was supposed to be my stand-in for Bonnie's orange) for Part 1, pinks are now replacing Bonnie's yellow.

I found Part 2 slow but easily breakable into chunks. First I cut all my pieces, then spent a while marking diagonal lines on 200 little squares with my frixion pen. After reading a bit about ergonomics, I moved my cutting area to my breakfast bar. It was great! I was able to cut while standing or seated without bending over.

Cutting set up at the breakfast bar!

Whites

greens

pinks

I do wish there was a way to make these chevrons while wasting less fabric. I saved all of my mini triangles left over but it did end up being a LOT of scraps!

Baggie of scrap triangles. Hopefully I can find a use for them!

Now, as for the stitching...I am really bad at sewing straight lines. Especially when Bonnie tells me to not sew ON the line, but NEXT TO the line. Sometimes I was on the line, sometimes I was right next to it, sometimes I was way off.

Waiting to be trimmed.

As a result, my final chevrons were often wonky.  I ended up spending a good amount of time squaring them all up in an attempt to correct some of the innacuracies.

Leftovers from squaring up my chevrons

Many met up correctly like this

But some just didn't line up, like this one!

I took some cues from others in the mystery and have been paper clipping each group of ten to keep track of numbers. I also learned that by keeping my chain pieces attached to each other, I can "chain iron" them.  It was definitely faster than when I was trimming them apart and then manually lining each up for the iron...looking back I don't know why I did it in such a slow manner!

Well I still have about 10 chevrons to make...I accidentally made 60/40 going in each direction instead of 50/50 so I have to go back and remake some of the chevron sides.  Talk to you next week after Part 3!