Design Wall Monday - December 17, 2018

How are you ladies coming along on Bonnie Hunter's mystery quilt (those of you who are doing it)?  I have been saving the clues and following along.  It sure looks interesting, as always.

But my week has been spent making more hsts and broken dishes blocks.

The quilt I want to make will be king sized, for our bed, and this week, I looked at the "big picture" of how many hsts, how many broken dishes blocks, and background blocks I will need.  Again, here's a picture of the vintage quilt I am using as a guide:

This is the point where I sometimes put a project aside, and say "I can't think about that right now, if I do, I'll go crazy.  I'll think about that tomorrow."  in my best 'Miss Scarlett O'Hara' imitation.  But this time I haven't.....not yet. 

I made a spreadsheet to look at how many parts are in each block if I divided the 100 x 100 inch size into 25 equal "blocks".......Below i a drawing a friend, Rosemary Youngs, drew up in quilting software, of a 20 inch by 20 inch "block"

There are a couple of hsts flipped the wrong way in this picture, but it's not important at this stage.  Since I am not a quilt designer, and have an accounting background, my quilt "plans" are usually spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel.  My spreadsheet tells me I will need 1,300 broken dishes blocks.  That's a lot, but then I said, o.k......how many should I make a day?

Each of the twenty five blocks in my plan are 20 inches by 20 inches, and have 52 of the little broken dishes blocks in each.  I am dividing this project into twenty five parts, but I want my fabrics which are scrappy to be in each of the blocks.  Which is why I would prefer to make all the broken dishes blocks first, before I assemble a single 20 inch square block.  This way, I can make a batch of 25 broken dishes blocks - all the same - but only one or two of each batch  would be in each 20 inch square block.  

So the method would be dividing the broken dishes blocks (2 inches square) production into units of 50 at a time.  Then use only two of these 50 in a 20 inch square.  So there would be production of 50 broken dishes blocks 26 times.  

Yesterday, I experimented to see how many broken dishes blocks I could make in one day.   Starting in the afternoon, after church:  Using triangle papers, I sewed 200 half square triangles.  Then cut them apart, removed the papers, ironed them open, and trimmed them to 1.5 inches by 1.5 inches.  Next I sewed 100 of them into "twos" and "twos" and now have 50 of the "twos" and "twos" sewn together for 25 complete broken dishes blocks.  50 were in the "two" and "two" status when I went to bed.  The second 100 were pressed open but not trimmed to the correct size.  From the time spent and progress made so far, at bedtime, I determined I could sew 50 broken dishes blocks in two days, but not one.

I had made 150 broken dishes blocks before I started this "big picture" spreadsheet, and after another day at it to complete the 50 above, this would make 200 complete and 1,100 more needed.   At 50 per batch, that's 22 batches.....each two days long.  44 days of sewing hsts and sewing them into units of four..... yikes......but the Bonnie Hunter mystery quilters are making large quantities of the same unit over and over, so it is being done.  I do have all of the plain background squares cut (1,000 of those) so that part is done.  If anyone wants a copy of my spreadsheet, I can email it to you.  

But this morning, I'm going to look at Design Wall Monday linkups and see what you are making!  And after all, tomorrow is another day.  Design Wall Monday linkup rules are simple - just refer back to this particular blog post somewhere within your blog post.  Thanks!  I really enjoy seeing what you are doing and I thank you for joining in each week.  

Please note that InLinkz has new format, and I may not be doing it right, so I may have to fix the below link.....but I hope it works o.k.  I'm not a techie 

Inlinkz Link Party