A Lazy Sort of Day

More and more I find I spend my Saturdays being lazy and recovering from my busy work weeks, and today was no exception. I have all kinds of things I want to do this weekend, but if they don't get done, it won't really matter in the overall cosmic scheme of things.

My quilting assistant, Spike, spent her day being as lazy as I was. She had a somewhat active burst mid-afternoon when she sat on the dresser in the bedroom and "talked" to the birds and the squirrels, but the rest of the day was spent laying around.

I didn't do much today besides sleeping and reading except to work on piecing the peppermint blocks. A couple of you asked if the pattern was paperpieced. Nope! It's the same basic technique used in many of the Buggy Barn patterns, and I took a couple photos to show you how these work in case you've never seen them.

Each pattern comes with a sheet that looks something like this:

You trace the pattern onto freezer paper, and you usually need to trace the pattern two or three times. You collect, press, and stack fat quarters in whatever configuration the pattern recommends--it seems that the Pieces From My Heart patterns often separate them out by color whereas the Buggy Barn patterns usually have you mix them up in certain ways--like light, dark, light, dark . . . or by stacking colors in a particular pattern. You then iron the freezer paper onto the top of a stack of fat quarters and cut along the pattern lines. Once you have your pieces cut, the directions tell you how to rotate the fabrics, and you end up with something like this (except you'd have a whole stack piled up--this was just the last of the blocks):

The pattern is often marked by numbers and/or letters so you can identify which sections should be switched and in what order to sew the pieces back together.

The effect looks something like paperpiecing but there's no paper to remove. Here's how the peppermint blocks look--

I still need to move them around a bit and pick out sashing and border fabrics, but I've finished all 12 blocks. Now that I think about it, I guess I did get something done today, even if it felt like I was just being lazy and doing nothing but playing!

Thanks for stopping by!