Today is the day to stop looking at my beautiful hand dyed fabrics and start cutting them up!  Does anyone else find it hard to make that first cut into a piece of fabric?

Well here they are – looking beautiful, don’t you think?  I do like the way that they look together so I am very excited by how they will work within my quilt idea.  I know that in an ideal world I will have sketched out ideas, and auditioned fabrics and colours, but I am very much a “just leap over the precipice and see” sort of person when it comes to making quilts.  It’s an adventure and shouldn’t be over-analysed at the planning stage.

Well, I managed it and got my trusty rotary cutter, ruler and board out and made that first cut.  I have cut the hearth squares out of the magenta and just a couple of strips of each of the other colours ready to build the log cabin blocks.  I know some people like to do all the cutting at one go, and be very precise over cutting individual pieces but with log cabin I prefer to cut strips and trim to size when I have added them.  How do you make your log cabin blocks?  Can you just spot the safety pin on the left hand side?  I have pinned the strips of each shade together with a safety pin and then joined all the safety pins together on an extra bigger pin so that  I won’t lose any pieces – let’s see how that works!

Well, have to go out now – a friend is having a book signing and I really want to go and pick one up – “The Lazy Optimist” by Martin Gladdish – I think it is going to be one of 2013’s best business books.  Get a copy and let me know what you think!

I’ll let you know how the sewing goes later!