My First Quilt: Part 2

After prepping my fabrics, I started cutting out the squares to make the hourglass blocks for the quilt center. I had to cut just as many white squares as colored, which started to get teee-deee-usss (that's tedious). If you know me, you know that I'm Impatient with a capital I.

Then I got to measuring, marking, sewing, cutting, ironing, more sewing, and squaring. Whew! A helpful tip I learned in my quilting class was to chain stitch the pieces. That means to start with a little "jumper" piece of scrap fabric and continuously sew all the blocks so they are connected by a little length of thread. There is no need to backstitch on quilt tops, and it saves time and thread by not starting and stopping with every piece. Brilliant!

Next up: sewing all the blocks together and devising a border.