Chisel Project for Social Sewing

 After I finished my Four Patch Shuffle top, I needed a new project to piece at social sewing. I have the Accuquilt Chisel die and I've been wanting to play with it, so I spent some time working on ideas in EQ8. I've also been wanting to make something in a palette of blues, teals, and cool greens, always a successful palette when done scrappy. 

Here's the initial concept in an EQ rendering: 

The chisel die makes 9" blocks so I planned a twin size quilt. The top as shown is 63 x 90" and I planned to add another 3" strip of chisel units to each side to bring the width up to 69".

I counted the number of light and dark pieces I'd need, pulled fabrics, and started cutting. I got everything cut in a couple hours. 

And then I discovered the problem. 

When the chisel die is used with the fabrics wrong sides together as it comes off the bolt, the die cut pieces are mirror image of each other. There's a left pointing shape and a right pointing shape. In the EQ illustration above, all the shapes are the same. Only the blocks are rotated. 

Since I'd already cut hundreds of chisel pieces, at this point I had two options. 

1) Make two small quilts, one with pinwheels rotating clockwise and the other rotating counter clockwise.

2) Change the design to something that could use both shapes of chisel pieces.

Back to EQ, I changed half of the blocks to feature chisel pieces going in the other direction. In the original layout, the pinwheels became odd shapes. I don't care for this; it looks like a mistake. I know they say if you make a mistake, repeat it several times and it becomes a design choice. Um, no thanks.

After more play in EQ, this is the best option I ended up with.

 Yes, it's busy, but nothing else works with the cut pieces I have and I don't want to waste them. It's a donation quilt and I'm sure it will look fine on someone's bed. 

So at social sewing I've been piecing pairs together, and when enough pairs are together I'll put them into blocks. 

There are right-facing blocks and left facing blocks for the quilt center, different pairs for the top and bottom rows, and different pairs for the left and right columns. The top, bottom, left and right blocks are colored differently to create the look of a border. In order to make this work, the quilt will finish 72 x 90", all blocks, no actual borders. 

A trick I've learned when making controlled scrappy quilts, where I don't want the same fabric touching itself in the final layout, is to sew the same two fabrics together, then the same fabrics into a block, That way I can move whole blocks around in the final layout without any of the fabrics in them touching itself. Sometimes due to my fabric quantity I wasn't able to always do that, but I'll scatter the odd pieces as much as possible and I don't think it will matter in the end. At social sewing I'll continue sewing pairs together and assorting them into blocks. 

It'll be awhile until I can get this top to the point of putting it on the design wall and laying out the blocks. No social sewing this week; I have something else going on. 

Link up: Small Quilts and Doll Quilts