Some time ago, I found a website that gave me a QR code that when scanned, it takes you to my blog. When I downloaded and printed it, my immediate thought was, "Wow! That would make a neat quilt!" I finally decided to make the quilt. I took the printed code and drew red lines to divide it into individual squares - 33x33 for 1089 squares.
I counted the number of black squares and the number of white squares. I decided to make the squares 2" finished. I then figured the number of 2 1/2 inch strips I needed to cut to yield the correct number of 2 1/2" squares.
Once the squares were cut, I set about to stack up the rows in the correct order and number. (I love these little flat, numbered pins!)
I worked on 4 rows at a time, chain piecing, being VERY careful to keep the squares in order within the individual row and not to mix up which row I was working on. (Ask me how I know how important that is!!)
Ordinarily, I would press seams to the dark, but there was no way to do that, so I pressed all seams of the odd-numbered rows to the left and all seams to the right of the even-numbered rows.
This let the rows "nest" together quite nicely when sewing one row to another without using any pins.
All this would appear to be quite easy - just sewing squares together. NOT. Have you tried to sew black to black?? And get the edges evenly matched?? First of all I had to have extra light, so my Ott light came in very handy.
Even then, it was still a challenge! It was easy enough to match the white to white or white to black...
But it was entirely a different story when you had to match the black to black....
It was very important to sew a consistent 1/4" seam since there were so many squares, so I had to really concentrate to make sure that was done.
When I was all finished piecing the top, I took it out in my backyard and hung it from my fence. I held my breath as I scanned it with my iPhone to see if it really would take me to my blog. I didn't want to start quilting it until I knew for sure - even though I had checked and rechecked it with my pattern.
YAY!!! Sure enough!! It worked!!
So I set about to quilt it. I decided to just stitch in the ditch with invisible thread. I'm not terribly pleased with the quilting since the invisible thread shows up on the black. But when you get back from it, it certainly is not visivble. It's just that I *know* it....and my perfectionistic tendencies sometimes drive me crazy!
I have it finished now and as soon as I get a chance to take a picture of it, I'll post it.
I think it is quite unique, and I like it, but it will be awhile before I sew black to black on a large scale again!
