No one suffers more than the cats when their human is deep in the Quilting Mines. Or so they tell me. Good thing I have made a lot of progress and am getting closer to done on this one.

The wool pressing pad is irresistable to my cats, especially Cookie. Honestly it’s my fault for leaving it out for two seconds.

Thought I’d give a little update on the Halloween quilt project I started a few weeks ago, as I have made some progress.

le sigh

A little relic of the Joann Fabric days in my stash, always makes me a bit sad to come across these. But the best thing to do is to use the fabric. It’s what Joann would have wanted.

I got to work and cut my stash of Halloween fabrics into strips. I probably should have measured carefully. In fact, most advice says yes, I absolutely should have. Maybe I should have done a bit of math to say, hmm, for my target block size, fabric strips need to be X width. That way I will have a fairly consistent amount of strips per block instead of just trying to wing it.

But I did not do that.

Early in the process, Pumpkin was appalled by my loosey-goosey approach. She’s inspecting my work and did not like what she saw.

That said, I kept on going. Thanks to various youtube tutorials, I learned early on that chain piecing the quilt blocks was a smart way to go with this. At first I really didn’t understand how that would save much time, but yes, thank you to the wisdom of others with lots more experience than me, because it absolutely did. At first it’d take a good while to make just one square, and then pretty soon I was making 4 at a time in the same amount of time.

The other thing that helped speed things up a bit was using sew-in interfacing to hold the whole block together. I wouldn’t use this for a quilt that I’d use as a bedspread but for just something I’m using as a tablecloth, it’s fine.

Soon enough I had a whole stack of blocks. I’m not done yet but I’m very close to putting it all together. It’s going to be tacky and chaotic when it’s all put together. Perfect for Halloween!

Speaking of chaos, my husband took this photo of me teaching my daughter some sewing basics and you can see my sewing table just…. a complete explosion of mess right now. It’s ridiculous.

I know some sewists work in meticulous sewing rooms or whatnot, and I’m sure that’s because they are very neat and tidy people in general. I am not one of those people.

In any case, Pumpkin says despite my messy start, and probably a lot of choices I’m going to regret as I piece it all together, the seams have hid a number of my sewing sins and here’s hoping we’ll all be none the wiser once it’s all done. Maybe it’ll even be done in time for Halloween this year. Hooray?