The Things You Can Think Of

It's a heck of a lot easier to tinker with a quilt layout when you move little pieces of paper around on the table rather than climb up and down a step stool arranging blocks on the design wall.  This layout, above, actually uses all four of the blocks I showed you yesterday. I don't know how this would look with fabric, but I want to try it out.

This layout would also use all four blocks.

So how did I make these little paper pieces?  I used Microsoft Excel.

This is the spreadsheet I worked up.  I did two rows like this...

I printed the sheets, and then cut the long rectangles apart diagonally.  For me it was an easy solution, but the big point is that you should use ALL the tools at your disposal, even if you don't get them at a quilt shop.

I Do Not Have Rocks In My Head!!!

I really hate it when I can't figure something out. I love to figure things out. Sometimes things just jump out at me and I can see them right away.  There's a particular puzzle a coworker showed me a few years ago. The letters of the alphabet were arranged in a particular way and the thing you had to figure out was where the letter Z was supposed to go. My coworker said I couldn't Google the answer or ask a kid. He must have had a hard time figuring it out. I looked at it, drew my fingertip across the line of letters and got it in less than three seconds. My coworker stood up and walked away, shaking his head. Now please bear in mind there are things I truly suck at, but I keep those under wraps (duh.)

By the way, when I solve a puzzle, I often say to myself "It's nice to know I don't have rocks in my head." (meaning my brain works.)

So it really pissed me off when I kept cutting blocks and was only able to use half of them, and I couldn't seem to get a handle on what was going on.

Well, I have figured it out!

Remember the other day when I showed this photo (above) and said you needed all four of those blocks? I was wrong. Each of the four is different, as you can see above. I have labelled them in the drawing below.

If you want to do the flip-flip-flip thing, which is what I am trying to do...

You need HALF the blocks above. But not the half you think! You need blocks TWO and FOUR (or One and Three, but you can't interchange them).  So when I created this layout above...

I had all these pieces left over (on the right). This perfectly matches what I have in the studio, where I have a ton of these fabric triangles strewn all over the floor.

Now go back to that first diagram and look at where blocks TWO and FOUR are located.

YUP! There ain't no easy (or efficient) way to cut those out. I finally figured out why I kept having trouble and ended up with blocks that were backwards or upside down. (It's how you orient your fabric before you make your first cut.)

The only way you can use all four blocks together is if you do something that doesn't do the flip flip flip, and instead arrange some blocks so the stripes go across each other like this. Or of course you could arrange them arbitrarily, and sixteen million other things, but I was trying to figure out why this damn thing wasn't behaving the way I expected it to. (Translation: I wanted it to flip flip flip on command.)

Now truth be told, my version on the design wall is even more complicated because I don't just have FOUR block variations, I have EIGHT. Remember, some strip pairs have BUSY DARKS and some have BUSY LIGHTS.

Maybe I DO have rocks in my head!!!

Yup, you're gonna be seeing a lot of this in the next few weeks. I can already tell there is more than one of these flipping things in my future.