Crafty Shelly: Brand New Project!!

Yep, thats right! I've been looking forward to this project for months. 1 because its for ME, 2 because it looks like it might take a while to get it done, and who knows the longer the project takes, the less money we spend on other projects! lol

Anyway, to begin with, THIS is the new project. Hopefully it will end up a King size at 102"x102".

I got this pattern and all the fabric from Janelle's awesome shop, Pieces to Treasure. Honestly, she has some of the most beautiful fabrics you've ever seen. She puts other local shops to shame. She puts a lot of care into selecting each bolt.

The pattern is actually from Cozy Quilt Designs in California. As I looked through some of their other patterns I had to get my husband to remind me a couple times, that I haven't even gotten a quarter of the way through my current project yet. I'll just file some of these away. I really, really liked this one. May have to get Janelle to get it for me. Oh wait... I'm not even a quarter of the way through my current project. Perhaps that should be a mantra or something...

The easy way to begin this project would be to get these really cool things called "Jelly Rolls" made by a company called Moda.

Each of these handy dandy little rolls contains 2 1/2" strips of all the fabrics you could need for a project like this, all you'd have to do is cut them down to the smaller pieces you need, and sew 'em together...

but that would be too easy, only NORMAL people do things the easy way! lol

In reality, Janelle didn't have a Jelly Roll in stock that had the colors I wanted. I wanted to stay a little truer to the pattern. I liked the earth tone colours in it and since I'm going through a brown phase right now, I asked if I could just get fabric from the bolt. Janelle didn't even hesitate to say yes. It probably cost me more in the end, but at least I got what I wanted and I'll enjoy looking at it and working on it because I like the fabric.

Janelle suggested I pick out 40 fabrics that I liked (40?! yikes!) So I got to 37 and ran out of steam. Then after reading the instructions we realized that I could get away with 24-25. So I had to whittle them back down, which was almost harder than picking them in the first place. The following are pictures of the fabrics that made the cut...

of course, pictures don't do them justice.

The strips above are actually a lot more chocolate in colour, the flash on my camera just doesn't cooperate much.

These are the fabrics I selected for the little middle squares and the strips between the blocks.

The darker one is more of a plum-y colour.

So after I chose them, I had a LOT of cutting to do. I needed to cut all of my 2 1/2" strips down to 3.5", 5.5", 7.5", and 9.5" strips, then the two colours above needed to be cut to 2" strips, sewn together then cut into 2" wide rectangles. I also needed several little 2" squares of the plum colour. I think I cut for about 3 days... really.

Here are some of the blocks so far with their 3.5 and 5.5" pieces put together. Janelle told me I just needed to mix all the pieces up, close my eyes, pick one and sew it on. That was ok for the 3.5"ers, but as I went to put the 5.5"ers on, I had to actually start planning them a little more carefully. The 7.5"ers and 9.5"ers are going to be tougher I think. There are 64 squares altogether.