The Best Time

How many of you have been quilting long enough to remember life before the rotary cutter and specialty rulers?  Did you save the cereal boxes to use for making templates?  Back in the day this is how I learned to quilt.    Drafting my own quilts and templates with a plain ole 12 inch school ruler and carboard.  

 Here I am today obsessed with finding the quickest way to square up HST's and timing the process with the stopwatch on my phone.  This timing of the process never happened in those early years.  I just did what I could, when I could and put no pressure on the process. 

 

And I most certainly did not buy any new gadgets to try to speed up the process like I did this weekend.  There's lots of new rulers out there right now for squaring up HST's.  The new slotted trimmers and Bloc Loc are the the two that look the most interesting.  But as usual my thrifty ways won't allow me to purchase either of them.  The next best thing is to make my own as cheaply as possible.   My thinking over the weekend was I need a smaller 4.5" ruler to make my homemade locking ruler.  A locking ruler is faster due to it locks on the seam, then two sides are trimmed.  Slide and twist the ruler  and trim the other two sides.  Very efficient!  With a smaller ruler there's less slide time and should make it quicker.

The smaller ruler saved me a whopping 2 minutes!  Was it worth it?  NO!  But I was excited anyway and thought maybe my technique need to be tweaked.   I'm going to try again today to beat my quickest time because I've lost my mind.  It's whatever keeps me going forward on the HST's.  They have been on the must do list of over 2 years.  

Until next time...

I hope you find time to stitch up something sweet!

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HST Progress And Throwback Thursday

They say the way to complete a large overwhelming task is to break it up into small chunks.  Sounds like a good plan.  The task I'll be tackling once again is squaring up over 3,000 half square triangles. 

  

How many HST's should I tackle in a day? 100? 200?   Yesterday's doable chunk was 139 HST's!  The plan was to do whatever I could until my lower back said it was time to stop.  Today, I think I'll see if sitting on a stool at the cutting table will allow me to get more done at one time.

For the first few minutes it felt like I was playing a preschool matching game as I tried to put like sizes together after trimming.  The post it notes may not be pretty but they are functional and made it much quicker to organize the HST's.  

Then I realized the Quilt In A Day Square up ruler is not as ideal as I once thought.  It's slippery and way to big for these small pieces.

Why was I not using my homemade locking ruler?  It's not as slippery, it's smaller and makes quick work of HST's, that's why I made it!  You know you have to many tools when you forget what you have on hand.  If you would like to know how to make one of these rulers, click here to watch my video tutorial.

So much quicker!  Zip, Zip and it's done.  

After trimming they are organized by size into baggies.  As small as 1" and as large as 3.5".

Looks like I'm going to need more than one baggie for some. 

Or a bigger bag.  There's tons of 1.5".  I've no clue how many.  I should have been keeping track as they were added to the bag. 

And then there's other sizes that only have one.

So while writing this post I decided to go big and ran to the Studio to lay out 200 HST's.  If I can do 139 while standing, I should be able to do 200 while sitting on a stool.  This will give me a break from standing and quilting at the frame.  I'm excited to see how this works out.  I've been trying to get these things squared up for years.  Hopefully this year is the year.  I would really like to use some of these in the OMIGOSH quilt pattern.

Until next time...

I hope you find time to stitch up something sweet!

Let's Throwback Thursday with a little cutie, ME! 

Mom had this doll custom made about 50 yrs ago from a picture of me when I was little.  The picture of me was poor quality and the maker thought my eyes were brown, they are blue. She hangs out with me everyday in my Studio.

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