If you follow me on Instagram, then you know that my week has been more about snip, snipping than it has been about stitch, stitching... which is highly unusual for me. When I work on a quilt, I usually cut a few blocks at a time, and then throw them under the machine, because if I'm being perfectly honest, then I might be a little impatient in that way.
I suppose there are two main reasons for this: firstly, I need a constant change of pace - I don't think I've cut a whole quilt before I started sewing it... ever! Perhaps it's because I just can't wait to get to the best part - sewing! I know, I know, it can really be a time saver to cut everything ahead, but it feels like pure torture to me to not just sit down and get started when the inspiration hits.
Secondly, I like to make things up as I go... it's just that sometimes I just don't know where I'm going with a quilt until I start. Once the first blocks are done, then they give me hints on how I should address the next ones. It somehow give me a freedom to go a different direction than previously planned if needed.
I get teased sometimes that I usually don't know how big a quilt top will be until I've actually finished it. (which is why I often end up with much bigger quilts than I'd planned) But there is something to be said about letting the quilt tell you how big it wants to be rather then me putting too many limits on it.
So now that it's not even two weeks until our fall retreat, I've decided to pull my Penny Sampler back out to have something to work on... I have to say that these are pretty labor intensive, one-thousand-bits-in-one-block blocks. But just to mix things up a bit for a change, it will actually be nice to just sit down and sew.
Do cut everything before you start sewing or do you let your quilts tell you how big they want to be?
