My Jacob's Ladder Project # 2

Yesterday spent time with my bee and took along the Jacob's Ladder project.  When my guild had it's quilt show, I had purchased a number fat quarters of different calicos from vendors there, enough to work on the 3 quilt tops that were already started. Then my brainstorm of marking the fabric in the last post.

It worked! though I wasn't so sure after marking the first one (probably because I was using the wrong marking tool).  I switched to a pencil for the 2nd one.  Thought I probably wouldn't continue that way but after sewing up the pieces for the first one, decided it was worth the time to mark the fabric and sew before cutting apart.  It was so easy to do though it took me two hours to get that first one marked, sewn, and cut.   The second one took half that time but I did have to take out some stitches because I was over enthused by the process and didn't watch closely where to stop and turn.

I did run into one problem when sewing on the diagonal.  The fabric appeared puffed up after the sewing was done.  At least I had over-sized the half square triangle units by 1/8 inch. I'll have to try the walking foot for the next one I mark up or change directions of the diagonals when I mark.  BTW, the colored fabric was layered with the background fabric in case you're wondering what's going on.  In this case I just used plain muslin.

Here's what it looked like after it was sewn and before I did the cutting.
Did decide that I didn't need to mark the cutting lines for the individual 2 1/2" squares as I can easily do that part when I'm cutting those 2 1/2" squares from the strips... after the strips have been sewn.

Looks like I might have to make another just so you can see the markings better and make the sewing more visible.

It was really nice though to be able to have most of the sewing done while uncut.  Next step will be to iron then sew the 4-patches together then build the block.  Oh, and the 1/2 square units will have to be slightly trimmed to correct size of 4 1/2" inches sq.

I haven't described the Jacob's ladder project that I'm doing.  The picture of the original old quilt is on the first part.

The first quilt will use one color blocks, probably without sashing but I might change my mind on that..  Then there will be two quilts with 2-color blocks similar to the old quilt, and the 4th quilt will be scrappy, mixing up all the colors that I've cut from these fat quarters.  The 2nd and 3rd will have sashing like the old quilt as will the scrappy one.

 I had to split up the 2-color blocks as I noticed that the light/dark ones didn't look good with the dark/light blocks so that is why there are two quilts being made with these.

These are some of the blocks I had finished up last year though in that picture, I was just playing around with the colors.

continued in # 3