Let the quilting begin

Sorry for the late in the week post, I've been staying at the cabin and didn't get pictures lined up in advance. It was a nice week, relaxing. If not cold in the unheated cabin when the temperatures were dipping below zero at night... But I'll live with that as long as I have ample comforters and lots of peace and quiet. The mail today brought me some good news. On June 1st is my convocation and I found out that I'll be getting the gold medal in mathematics (honours) and the gold medal in statistics (4-year). Something to smile about. I don't get people who don't go to their convocations. I wouldn't dream of missing mine. After killing myself for five years to lead up to this point, I want to be handed those degrees, not get them with bills in the mail...
I'd say there was lots of knitting going on but that would be a lie as I've been playing with my new toy, the sewing machine. This weekend after butchering a yard of two kinds of fabric because I was completely unable to measure the pieces correctly I have wound up with a cute little clutch purse. The button fastener is a little off centre but other than that I am extremely happy with it. It's really more of a little girl's purse but I do have a little girl in mind that will hopefully love it. It's all flannel fabric so it's very soft. The pattern is the "Artsy Clutch" from the Bend The Rules Sewing book by Amy Karol. Cute no?


Now, having had the machine for just over two weeks that must only mean one thing, I started my quilting class yesterday!!! Oh it was wonderful. There are 8 of us in the class, though one lady won't be coming until next week. I believe that I'm the youngest by atleast 20 years but they're all so nice. And the instructor is wonderful too. Today was very much so the math lesson. The quilt we're making is a log cabin quilt. Therefore it's a little math figuring the make sure you're cutting the pieces in the appropriate size increases. We learned how to figure how many strips we'd get per metre of fabric so how wide of fabric of each kind. I'm doing my blocks in four colours with two shades of each of the main colours. Well, five colours I suppose as I have a centre block in a different colour. Here's the sketch of each of my blocks (note, not really using orange, that was just the only other shade of red in the pack of pencil crayons)

See the fun calculations? Most people are doing two colours but as I was done all the calculator work much before the others I was able to play around with colours and noticed that with rotations I could get a cute triangular pattern, this is how it'll look pieced together:

There are 24 blocks (4 by 6) each nine inches square. Needless to say that it's a lap blanket size for my very first quilt. Some are tackling like double or queen sized bed sized blankets. Considering that we get two weeks to sew all of our blocks (and I will be gone for 6 of those days), that is so far out of my reach at the moment, I don't want to think about it. but I'm happy with what I've done. Here's a sneak peek at the colours:

Homework for this week: Wash and press the fabrics, pre-cut all of my strips and sort by strip letter. I'm excited!