Farmer's Wife Friday 19

I'm so close to getting caught up. I've been doing 3-4 blocks each week that I've set a new goal of having 56 blocks done by July 6. If my Fourth of July weekend turns out anything like Memorial Day I should be able to make a lot of blocks. 56 blocks will put me half way to my goal of 111.

I used templates for Farmer's Daughter. I could probably work out the math, but a 5x5 grid in a 6" block is going to result in some wonky measurements. One of the tricks I've learned with the templates is to place the fabric on a sheet of sand paper (I prefer 150 grit.) Without the fabric shifting the templates aren't nearly so much of a headache.

#32 Farmer's Daughter

For Temperance Tree I went back to my usual method of HSTs and rotary cutting squares. There's a little bit of accuracy troubles, but the sashing will help with that.

#95 Temperance Tree

I'm not a big fan of baskets, but this one is so much fun I might have to play with a quilt made from this block.

#42 Fruit Basket

After work one night this week I was putting together these blocks and my husband was surprised by my organizational system. I was struggling to keep all of those tiny pieces straight so I pulled some containers from our cabinet that were missing their lids and assigned one container to each block. (The fact that we have so many containers with missing lids might be part of why my husband was surprised that I had an organizational system.) I've put a piece of masking tape on each container and write the name of the block I'm working on. I've heard of people using paper plates to do this same system, but this is what I had on hand.

I've been storing all of my fabric for this quilt in a large tote. I've been trying to keep similar colors together, but it's been getting more and more mixed up. This weekend I finally got fed up with my fabric bin, and organized that too. I have a lot of yardage I'm using for this block so I cut up an old box to use as dividers. If I was making this in a scrappier version I think I'd make dividers for my lights, mediums, and darks. I've been saving the papers from my templates to use as scratch paper so that's at the back of my fabric. By organizing my bin this way I have enough space to store my blocks neatly in my bin too. I cut a divider for the back so my blocks are in one section. The other section is where I'm storing the tiny bits that are still big enough for blocks, and the extra HST units that I accidentally make. 

This is my first week with this system, but I think it will make me a lot happier.

45/111

51:30