Quilt 10: Assembling the Top

Last month I got the pieces for the "Forbidden Palace" quilt cut out and assembled the first block. I was worried it was going to take me forever to get the little rectangle "snowball" blocks pressed - and we won't even talk about how pulling the little black corners back with my fingers left me vulnerable to getting my fingers singed!

I needn't have worried - because once I started pressing, I realized that I could move very fast indeed and needn't expose my fingertips. All I had to do was lay out the blocks in a row on my ironing board. Then, with the iron heated, I pressed the top of the iron firmly into the fabric just below the little black wedges that I wanted to flip and press.

Pressing down firmly, the iron's edge caught the black corners and VOILA!



The corners on top flipped up beautifully and it only took half a second! So all I had to do was flip the "top" of each block, then quickly turn them upside down and repeat the process on the bottoms.



Bang! Those blockes were pressed and ready in less than 40 minutes. Now for the task of deciding which blocks will sit next to which blocks.

The quilt has 16 columns (across) and 10 rows (down). I carefully selected the blocks for the first row... really took my time. Satisfied, I did row 2, again going slowly and carefully considering each one. It took about half an hour to get that far.

Let's do the math... 30 minutes for 2 rows, need to do 8 more rows.

At this pace I'd be at it another 2 hours. So I decided to stop being quite so careful and instead just randomly throw down the blocks to see what would happen. The picture below was taken 15 minutes later:



There were maybe half a dozen blocks that, when randomly tossed in, landed next to something that really CLASHED - but for the most part, just tossing the blocks randomly worked out just fine.



Now for the trickiest bit of all: picking up the pieces and keeping them in order as I'm stitching. Not only that... but many of the prints were "one way" designs with a definite top and bottom. I had to be sure that I didn't inadvertently flip one of those blocks and sew it on upside down.

Daunting!

But I came up with a method to keep me straight.

I began by stacking up the blocks from the bottom row - with the rightmost block on the top. As long as I worked down thru the stack in order, I was able to get the blocks assembled into a strip. I did the same thing with the row second from the bottom - but on that one I put 2 safety pins near the bottom. This helped not only to identify the which end was "down".. but helped me to keep straight which strip was the bottom and which was 2nd from the bottom.

When both strips were done, I stitched them together, careful to mind where the pins were. Then I went to the next 2 rows (heading up the quilt) and used the same approach.

Fiddly? Yeah... but the top is assembled now and all the blocks are in the same order that I laid them on the floor.