Sewing Day With Mom

I set aside today for working on a special project and to sew with mom.  Our sewing time together is so precious to me.  Mom sewed some of the blocks for my special project (I can let you in on it later) while I cut out more fabric for the quilt.  We got all of the partial blocks done and now all I have to do is complete the rows and add a border.  Yippie.  I hope to complete that project this weekend.

Mom brought some Christmas fabric today and wanted to cut out a Christmas quilt.  We cut out a quilt using this ornament fabric as the center of a signature block pattern, without the signatures...hehe and are using green Christmas theme fabric for the triangles.  We cut out this entire quilt in just a few minutes using the Accuquilt cutter.  Wow does that save me a lot of cutting time.  Love this machine.

Since we got the first quilt cut out so quickly mom decided to cut out another one using this red fabric in the center.  So she is working on two Christmas quilts.

 Here's mom piecing a couple of sample blocks for her quilts.

Below is a picture of the green Christmas prints that we cut out for her to use.  See in the front on the right stack......that is Elvis Christmas fabric that she brought. 

Mom has also been busy piecing string blocks on phone book pages to use in quilts.  She pieces them and brings them to me to square up.  Today I had a lightbulb moment.  Why not square them up with the Accuquilt?  I had not tried it before because of all of the layers in the string blocks.  But why not?

I looked at the blocks mom had pieced and decided I could use my 5-inch block die.  It will cut 8 blocks at a time and 10 fabrics deep.

The first time I laid one string block on each space on the die and cut out 8 perfectly square 5-inch blocks.  YIPPIE!!  That was exciting, but you know me I couldn't just do one layer.  I carefully looked over the blocks and estimated that I would count each block as 3 layers......so technically I could layer two or three of the string pieced blocks at a time and cut our 16-24 total 5-inch blocks with each turn of the machine!!  I chose to play it safe and layer only two blocks at a time.  Man I can tell you that this truly saves me a ton of time.  We cut out over 100 blocks that mom had pieced in just 15 minutes.  I can truly say that it would have taken me a long time to get all of those blocks squared up for her using my rotary cutter and a square ruler one block at a time.

See the beautiful string pieced blocks.  Mom is going to have some wonderful quilts out of these.

 And here are the remains......I convinced mom that we could throw these out.  We don't have to try to piece these into any more blocks.  She agreed that she thought we have gotten the money's worth out of these scraps.

Not to let you think that she is finished piecing scrap blocks, she went home with a trash bag full of scraps from us cutting out some Habitat quilt kits, her Christmas quilts and my special project quilt.  I'm sure I'll have many more strip blocks to square up soon.   But now I have a secret weapon..  Thank you Accuquilt!

Better go check on the hubby....he's watching the Florida/Florida State football game and is planning to watch the Clemson/Carolina game tonight.  Maybe time for some snacks.

Happy Quilting,
Shelia