Strip cutting

Yesterday we looked at the fabric pull for the ocean/whale baby quilt.

In the original (pieced) pattern, she has one fabric that appears several times in the waves and also in the Sashing. Maybe I should pick that one first.

My eye immediately went to this fabric…..

It has all of the colors that I am wanting to use so THIS will be my main fabric!!

Since I have changed this pattern so drastically, I needed to do some calculations and thinking before I actually started cutting the fabric.

I decided to start cutting strips, mostly at 4 inches in width. As I cut, I reduced that size some for a few of the strips.

The most important thing with this quilt is the fabric placement, so I really want to have all of my strips cut before I start fusing them together.

Also, after looking at the pattern further, I am thinking that it might be good to have some straight lines every so often, so maybe I will do the fabrics in sets of four or five and then sew those strip sets together.

Regardless, I still need to get my fabric placement. 

After a few minutes of cutting, this is where I landed…..

NOT that this is what the final layout looked like, but at least I knew that I liked the colors!!

NOW it was time to start cutting the curves.

I drew the first curve on Wonder-Under and ironed it to the middle of one of the 4-inch strips…..

Once I had cut it on the line, I realized that I now had TWO strips……

OKAY….that was fun!!

Now came the frustrating part of this venture. I kept saying that I was…..

Appropriate….eh???
The problem was trying to get the waves to be opposite to one another, remembering that the wonder-under had to be reversed and that everything had to fit in the strip!!

It simply WASN’T working so I walked out of the studio and had a little think about it!!

The next day, I decided that for each strip set, I would use ONE base fabric and attach strips to either side of it.

This seemed to work better.

The first step of this NEW process was to draw an alternating wave on the backside of the Wonder Under…..

I would then carefully lay the next strip of fabric over the Wonder-Under….

Carry it carefully to the ironing board, being sure to keep the fusible strip on the correct edge of the fabric strip……

….and then iron the Wonder-Under in place, making sure that the cutting line is as close as possible to the fabric edge…..

I was sure to iron on a Teflon mat so that I didn’t destroy my ironing board cover!!

After cutting it out, the strip fit PERFECTLY…..

PHEW!!!! I was losing my mind over this one!!

Come back on Saturday and we will resume the making of this CUTE quilt!!