Home Sick

Ryan is home sick today and I volunteered to stay with him to keep an eye on his fever.  His fever is under control and I've spent the time in between making quilt plans.  

 I was lucky enough to get a beautiful assortment of hand dyed fabrics from Vicki as part of last year's Rainbow Scrap Challenge giveaway.  I was waiting for just the right inspiration and felt terrified to cut into such gorgeous fabrics.  I had a light, medium and dark color wheel stash pack to which I added a few coordinating batiks.  There is fabric enough for 13 blocks, I'll have one extra at the end just in case, and best of all, after making the blocks, there will be plenty of extra fabric to incorporate into next year's challenge blocks!

After playing with a sketch book and making a practice block over thanksgiving, I finally felt ready to jump in.

 So I started by sketching out a paper piecing template on a large piece of freezer paper.  Not having a large enough compass, I used the handy pencil and string method of drawing two arcs.  I used a protractor to make hash marks each 9 degrees and then used those as a basis for 4 whole spikes and two half spikes.

 I cut those apart carefully on the curved lines, leaving plenty of room around the outside for seam allowances and squaring up.  

 After that I ironed the freezer paper to to the outer in inner circles and paper pieced the center arc.  Easy peasy?  Well, not too bad anyway.  It helped to leave plenty of space around the outside for squaring up later.  I'd like each block to be different.  Maybe flying geese for the next one?  Best of all, the fabulous fabrics are getting put to good use instead of hiding in a cupboard.

We had family portraits made over Thanksgiving break.  That was before Ryan started hacking up a lung and Sydney started tossing her cookies.  I think the in-laws were pretty glad to see us head out the front door.