With Covid still rampant, and my current snails trail project getting a bit boring, I decided to unearth all my groups of squares and finish putting them together. My new sewing machine has a setting to allow you to set a seam length, to I thought I would give it a go.
I selected tie off start, tie off end, and cut thread, and began chain piecing the first three pairs of pieces for the left side of the 9-patch block. As I neared the end of the third set, I pressed the reverse button once, and the machine tied off, and then cut the thread. All I had to do then was open up the pieces, give them a finger press and line on top of them their next piece. I then placed the first two under the presser foot, and set off, chain piecing until the end when the machine automatically tied off when it got to the end and cut the thread. Wonderful ! The machine remembered the set number of stitches to be sewn for each set. So I quickly ended up with a pile of chain pieced half sewn 9-patch blocks, that then needed their final two seams sewn. See top picture.
Because the final seams of the block were obviously shorter than the first set, I had to start the setting process again, but by now I had learnt what to do and it was easy to set the length for the machine to sew each seam and stop in the right place and tie off and cut the thread. I finished sewing all the little squares and again began sorting them into colour groups using my 'Ultimate 3-in-1 Color Tool'. This tool is fabulous, and I quickly had 24 piles of 9-patch blocks of the full colour range plus black and whites, multi colours and greys.
Obviously I was interrupted by Oskar who insisted on deciding that this was the best place to settle for his morning sleep!
Once I had all the piles sorted I knew the difficult part was ahead of me.....how to place them together with an arrangement that 'flowed' the colours together. More on that subject tomorrow.