How to be Awesome at Quilting Part 3

Yesterday was our next installment of "Craft Day With Bekah," as I refer to it in my mind.  We had both finished our nine-squares, and now we needed to put them together.

Well, cut them apart and then put them together.  Let me tell you, after spending quite a good bit of time sewing all those squares, it almost physically hurt me to start cutting them up again.  Basically, we figured out that the steps for this quilt go something like this:

1)  Buy large pieces of material.

2)  Cut them into small pieces of material.

3)  Sew them together into medium-sized pieces of material.

4)  Cut those medium pieces into small pieces of material.

5)  Then sew the small pieces into one large piece of material.

Really?  Only humans could make something that unnecessarily complicated and call it a hobby.

But we did.  We took the nine-squares and cut them into fourths, like this.

I started out keeping all my squares together, but I decided I didn't want any sort of pattern, so I ended up mixing them all up, which was difficult for me to do, but necessary.  So we got them all cut up.

Then we had to lay them out and figure out what the quilt was actually going to look like.  Bekah decided to do something awesome with this big panel in the middle and all the nine-squares around it.  I did not.  I was doing good just to get them laid out in a way that didn't drive me crazy, with too much black over here or too much red over there.  Bekah and Mrs. Woosley, Bekah's mom, both had to help me, and it took like, almost half an hour.  We kept having to go up the stairs and look at it from far away because the pattern would get in your head and make you crazy if you concentrated on it too long.  It's like the opposite of a Magic Eye puzzle.  The longer you look at it, the less you see.

Finally, after lots of, "Move that one over there.  No, that won't work because of the red.  Hand me that one.  No, too much black.  Ok, put it back," we got it laid out.

Then I labeled each square with tape, 1A, 1B, 1C, etc. so I wouldn't forget what order they went in, and I started sewing the rows. 

That wasn't too terribly hard, except for the time my fabrics got out of line and I ended up with a big hole in my seam.  That wasn't cool, but I fixed it. 

And a drum roll for the final product, please!

TA DA!

Sadly though, this is like, maybe halfway finished.  Because now I have to get the backing, the border, the edge stuff, and the stuffing, and then actually start quilting it.  I'm super excited about my idea for quilting it though, so that should give me a little extra motivation.

Now I just have to figure out how to quilt a blanket in the Alabama summer without letting it touch me.