This looks unimpressive, but here are 16 (pressed!) blocks for Mom & Dad’s quilt.

I’ve got 4 brown ones, 6 aqua ones, and 6 cream/light brown ones. The next step is to CHOP THEM UP AGAIN. That is the most depressing part of the Disappearing Nine Patch quilt (well, mostly it’s the ironing you have to do as a result of that) - you divide these blocks into quarters, twist two parts, and then sew them back to together. Frankenquilt-style. This will all become clearer in Progress Report #4, I hope.

The other part I worked on was figuring out how to lay out these 16 blocks into a 4×4 grid that 1) won’t have any two blocks of the same color touching, and 2) doesn’t look like ass. Guess which one of those criteria is easier?

I broke out a spreadsheet, ya’ll! With conditional formatting! And CountIf functions! Which just goes to prove you can’t take the geek out of the girl, much less get her away from the computer long enough to finish a quilt on time.

I’m throwing this up here in case my parents want to weigh in on the layouts. I kind of think the top layout is a bit cliche - brown cornerstones! I like the middle one because it’s got a bit of pinwheel action going on with the symmetry. And the bottom one has some symmetry on the diagonal, but not so much it’s overwhelmingly swoopy.

My technical terms, let me show you them.

In other news, I finished the quilt for the Good Mews Kitty Kegger. Here it is:

(that’s Brief holding it up, as it turned out (AGAIN) a bit bigger than anticipated. Eh. Consider that extra bit for the cats to sit on.) The feature fabric has cartoon cats frolicking with bugs. Sadly, it’s not true-to-life and there are no spare cricket legs or moth wings laying about on the ground. But it’s DONE. And to that I say Huzzah!

I’m still a little twisted up over yesterday’s events, all of which have been resolved, but the two lowlights include having to take Boxer out of his soccer game for pushing kids down and the subsequent crying and general upset-ness he showed to the point that the coach on the other team started tearing up over it when Boxer went to apologize and go back in the game. And then at the Fall Festival we lost Bloomer for a good 15 minutes when she wandered off from the playground and snuck into a bounce house.

Then this morning she started putting laundry in the toilet and I LOST IT. Not just because it was laundry, but because it was a shirt that I had made. For me. Which is rare. The scene was not pretty. I apologized to her later, but still. Not too proud of that.

October has not been our finest month.

So rather than dwell on that stuff which is making me feel like I still have PMS even though I know I don’t, here is the quilt that I made for the auction for the Fall Festival. The school mascot is a Star, hence the large medallion in the middle.

I have decided I’m not bothering to donate quilts to auctions anymore because they never go for what they are worth. I am doing one more for Good Mews this year, but I think it will be my last. I put too much effort into them and seeing it go for $20 is simply not a good use of my time and the space required to display it properly (which the school did not, frankly, for this one).

But hey! On that note, I’m going to have a couple more baby quilts up on my etsy shop shortly. Including a fleece one for $25. Now, please resume not looking at me while I’m this grumpy.

Alternate title: My Math and Photoshopping Skillz, Let Me Show You Them.

So I got the squares grouped into groups of nine. The layout is 16 Disappearing Nine Patch blocks, which math nerds will know lays out to a 4×4 grid. Each block needs (quiz time!) nine squares, so 9 x 16 = 144. I wanted a mix of cream blocks, brown blocks, and aqua blocks. Given that a spreadsheet wasn’t really a viable alternative for sorting these bad boys out (the tape you use to stick them on the monitor eventually breaks and poof! you’ve got a mess all over your desk), I made piles.

Side note: Today’s post brought to you by Piles! The Lazy Man’s organization system.

Behold, my piles:

Once I got them all put together - no two groups of 9 blocks are the same! - I thought, huh, wow, those seem like small piles. I double checked my math - 144 blocks, yessiree! For comparison, here are my piles next to the stack of unused blocks I cut out.

So it looks like I could make another couple quilts with the leftovers. For elephants.

I asked my mom if she wanted me to blog my progress on the quilt I’m making for their king-sized bed, and she said, “Sure!” So here’s my first progress post. Mostly my progress has involved ironing and cutting, which is still a lot of work and occasional rotary slice of the finger. Since there’s no red in this quilt, though, I probably shouldn’t bleed all over it.

Anywho, when my parents remodeled their bathroom, they also painted the master bedroom and put up some new curtains. Picture borrowed from my mom’s blog:

When we were visiting… an embarassingly long time ago given how long it’s taken me to get this quilt going, my mom picked out some main fabrics for borders and such, and since then I’ve been collecting browns and creams and aquas. I need 144 squares to go forth with my plan to do a disappearing nine patch in a blocky pattern that mirrors the curtains, and I think I’ve cut 175 or so to make sure I have variety.

I’ve also cut the borders and binding, but that’s not as fun to look at as stacks of blocks.

Also, aquas are crazy hard to find in the right tone. I have collected rather a large amount of ill-matched aqua fabric that I’ll make totebags out of or something. Alternately, I could do what I frequently recommend at my quilt group: Quilts for the Blind.