Charting

The hand quilting continues at a slow but steady pace in a nothing-to-see-here fashion. I did finish quilting around motifs in the hooped area and shifted the block to an unquilted area, which let me see just how much was already quilted. I wasn't sure how far I had gotten so was pleased to find only about a third left to go (plus around those blue swirls around the outside). In the meantime, the mind keeps playing with the baby quilt configuration and what colors I might choose. Most of all, I felt I needed to pin down the size of the individual pieces, both to double check the finished quilt size and to get a sense of how much of each fabric I might need. I know a lot of quilters might turn to a software program to help them out with this, and I used to too. But sometimes it's just quicker to get out the graph paper and chart things out. So that is what I did this week. Did you know you could download PDFs off the internet for printing your own custom graph paper? Lined paper too.

Having this visual is helping me consider whether or not to shorten and/or widen the quilt. And mapping it out using paper and pencil helped me see the rhythm of the design, the relationship between the pieces. Where for awhile I was letting this idea for a quilt intimidate me, now I have all the information pinned down in a way that shows me it's not intimidating at all.