I have continued to push forward on this quilt despite the regular level of discomfort for working outside of the box!  You will remember that I took a class with Kaffe Fassett and Brandon Mabley a few months ago.  The post is here if you are interested.  And, you can see some early work on creating the diamonds here.

 I finished sewing all 60 of the bordered diamonds a few weeks ago and finally set out to organizing the quilt top.  Another mind bender….

The layout of the blocks of the quilt took me a few hours.  You see there are alternating rows of dark borders with light diamonds and of light borders with dark diamonds.  This has opened up a whole new world for me of color…color is only a certain lightness or darkness as it relates to it’s surroundings.  In fact, any color can be light or dark depending upon the surroundings.  The rows above represent the light interior diamond and a dark border.  Take a look at each for yourself and see the light and dark within each diamond.

When I saw mind bender, I really mean it.  I literally laid this thing out and moved things for a few hours.  I played with light and dark, adjacencies and eventually stepped away for a few hours before I made my final tweaks.  One thing that helped for me was to take a few photos and look at the photos than the actual thing.  It gave me a different perspective.  Here it is all laid out…not the final version I believe, but close.

Now, came the fun.  Sewing all the blocks together.  Okay…sewing diamonds together and getting all four corners to match up is NOT the easiest thing to do.  You sew in diagonal rows which is hard to keep track of sometimes!  I picked up the blocks in the order that they needed to be sewed and labeled them by row so that I knew which order to sew the rows in and then the order I knew sew the rows together.

I ripped out a lot of seams the first few rows until I got the hang of it.  If you are sewing with a 1/4″ seam, you need to make sure that when you line up your blocks that they overlap by a 1/4″.  See the slight overhang on the right side of the block…it is so little but makes such a big difference.

The one below is more visible since you can see the small corner peaking out….that makes all the different in lining up the corners.  For this quilt, I pinned every single block together.  It made a big difference I think.

Kaffe Bordered Diamonds Quilt

Here is a close up of some of the diamonds sewn together…you can see how perfectly the corners match up…not all of them, but most of them.

More to come on this one when I show off the entire top, the backing selected and start the quilting process!

Happy Day…how will you climb out of your box today?