How a Quilter Exercises

I used to have a desk job.  Now that I’m retired, I try to build in a little exercise wherever I can, but today I think I got my fill.  This is what happened (and a little background).

A couple of days ago, I picked a pattern from a quilt book.  It was a darling quilt in bright fabrics – perfect for children.  I cut out the right number of pieces for five or six blocks to start and then got chased out of the sewing room by the lightning (a seasonal hazard here in west central Florida).  This photo is from Brazil, but shows the awesome power of these storms:

http://freenaturepictures.blogspot.com/

So I picked up today where I left off then  - No problem – I was ready to go.

I laid out the block pieces nice and neatly on the cutting board ready to sew.  Wait!  I’m missing two squares at the top and bottom corners of each block.  How did THAT happen?  So I get up and cut those squares – fortunately, I had plenty of fabric.  Getting up to cut those was the start of the exercise for the day.

I then sewed the left column of pieces I had laid out to the middle column.  Very pretty:

Then I sewed the left sections to the right column.  Again, very pretty:

More exercise (now this is planned – I have to get up to go to the ironing board so I get some activity – good plan, huh?) – well, I get up to iron the tops and bottoms ready to sew to the middles.

 Wait AGAIN!  What’s wrong with this picture?

The tops and bottoms aren’t the right size to sew to the middles.  Now, I’ve heard tell of quilters that actually read and follow the directions, but I thought I KNEW what I was doing.

I checked out the picture in the book.  Yep.  It’s perfectly clear that only one corner on the top and one corner on the bottom has the square – that’s why I didn’t need those extra pieces I had just cut.

Go to get the seam ripper – more exercise.  Do the frog imitation – rippit, rippit.

Sew the corrected tops to the middles and get up to iron – count that as exercise.

Then sew the bottoms to the middles.  You got it, more ironing and exercise getting to the ironing board.

Then, get up to square up the blocks – more exercise (hey, every little bit counts).

And I only ended up with a few blocks, but I like the way they’re developing, so it’s back to make more tomorrow (got chased out by thunderstorm AGAIN today). 

Might glance at the picture before starting in again tomorrow – LOL.