Iron the squares! what the heck!!! now where did I put that darn iron? Day 3 of working on the quilt. And by the way, the rotary cutter is amazing.

My time to work on my crafts is limited so I have to grab an hour here and an hour there when I can. So today I wanted to cut out the other set of squares using the rotary cutter we picked up on our shopping excursion on Wednesday.

The cutter is amazing.  It cuts so nice and straight and doesn't seem to leave the fabric with any frayed edges.  Wish I had had it from the start but not going back and starting again, that's for sure.

So now I had another six brown squares to utilise so I thought I would re-design my patterning.  I drew up another grid and I played around with ideas using the squares.

This was my first try.

I decided to still use some of the little flowers on white squares as I could keep them away from the red hearts on white now I was using less of them and had added another set of different squares.  I wasn't too sure of the design though, I think I needed to spread the colours out a bit more, so I came up with this instead.

I realised I could have played around with more ideas and come up with different designs all day but I decided to go with this.

Now came the question of which sewing machine to use.  My Singer sews pretty nice and straight but the 'Brother inherited from mum in law' has a bigger sewing base.  I tried them both and decided on the Brother.  I swear my mum in law has put the mockers on it though as when I first tried it, it wouldn't sew properly.  Somehow I had mis-threaded it but I found the error and it corrected it and it was fine.  It has a guide attachment which I am using.  (I have been using sewing machines for 60 years so to not thread it properly was a bit weird, hence the mum in law 'mockers' theory).

I couldn't set it correctly to sew just 1/4" though because of the feeder teeth so my seams will be just over 1/4". I figure that if they are all the same it won't matter.  I will increase the border to compensate so the overall quilt size will be the same.  I am not cutting the border out until I have the main body all sewn up and know the exact size I need.

So somewhere I read that I had to iron my squares.  Now, I gave up ironing years ago!  Yes, I do have one and I even have an ironing board.  I knew where the board was but I had to hunt down the iron.  Stashed away in a cupboard so as to not gather dust!

So I dutifully ironed all my squares being careful to keep them in their rows and corrrect positions.

Then I bagged them up in rows in ziploc bags, marked them and put them away until next week sometime.

I bought down the centre square to work on over the weekend as I will hand sew the red and blue piece onto the white backing.  I can do that while watching TV in the evenings.

Now it's time to stop and make dinner, so that's it for today.  Have a great weekend and hope you enjoy the Superbowl on Sunday.