Today I spent time creating my design and ordering the blocks.

I found a design I thought would be a nice one to start with in one of the quilting magazines I found, but I wanted to modify it some, so I started playing around on Excel, and came up with someone quite different from what It thought it was going to be. But that’s good, because I like this a lot better.

Then Michael helped me figure out the math: how wide to cut my strips, how big the resulting blocks will be (taking 1/4 inch seams into account) and how many blocks make what sized quilt, and then rearranging the design once again to work better with the final quilt size I wanted.

It is completely out of character for me to plan this much ahead of time for ANYTHING, but I want to do it right, and figuring everything out was kinda fun actually.

Since I want to work with gradients, I also organized the fabric into lights, darks, and mid-colors. You can see a hint of the pattern I came up with on the screen of my laptop. (Let me tell you, for something like this, the format painter is TOTALLY your best friend.)

And that’s where we are this evening. Depending upon how things go, perhaps tomorrow I’ll start cutting strips.