'Tis the Season...

when I get to spend time in my hidey hole!  Each morning this week I have been able to spend a couple early morning hours sewing.  I love my sewing room, with my custom built cutting table and sewing center that my dad made.  It is with reluctance, that I drag myself up the stairs to face the world and laundry!

I've been bouncing between sewing a spring quilt for our bed, and cutting a fall quilt for the bed in Alicia's room.  I finished cutting the fall quilt this morning.  Cutting takes patience, so I find it best to cut for a while, and then sew for a while, so that neither process gets short changed with impatience.

I took a few photos of the finished cutting of the fall quilt.

I am making a maple leaf block with a chain block for this fall quilt.  The maple leaves will be several different colors.

This is my cutting instruction sheet.  I'll put this in to the box in the hopes that I will remember what I am supposed to do when it comes time to sew!

To keep everything in order, I put various size pieces in to zip lock bags, marked, so that I remember what goes where!

Beth has taught me to make sample blocks before you just start in cutting a whole quilt.  It is not uncommon to have mistakes in the cutting instructions.  It would be very frustrating to discover this after all the pieces were cut.

Now all the zip lock bags go in to one of these plastic project boxes.

Snap the lid shut and it's ready to be assembled at any time.

So, I now have five quilts that are cut and ready to sew.  Plus the spring quilt that is at the sewing machine!   I am kind of obsessed with having project cut and ready to go, when I am ready to go.  It takes so much time to cut and I find it much easier to do this part of the process over a period of time, rather than all at once.  Any bets on how many of these boxes will be empty by the time I have to sit on a tractor again in the spring?

The trouble with cutting so many quilts in advance, is that I sometime forget what I was planning to do by the time I get to the sewing part!  I've started making better directions to put in to the containers, so that I don't forget what my original plan is.  Now if I would just read those directions before I start off sewing!