Labor of Love: Sewing has been done!!!

I am so proud of myself. I successfully cut out all my little triangles and squares and rectangles earlier this week. I sewed the first set of patches together -- 2 triangles sandwiching a square and a little triangle hat on top. Egads but that was hard, getting all those corners matched.

Then, as I guess anyone who has quilted before knows, I found that the triangles were taller than the square. I couldn't figure out what I'd done wrong.  I called in reinforcements.

This time I emailed a friend back home and asked her -- am I doing this right? And, how do I line up the triangles?? Match the bottoms? Or center them so that the excess is on both sides???

She came to my rescue (and my great relief) when she said that "If you have cut it out right, the triangles will be too big; this is so they are the right size after the seams" -- whew! Then she said to line up the bottom edge, and the tops would take care of themselves when I sew the strips together.

too big triangles and my wonderfully neat, straight, even stitching....

So that's what I did.  Only on one strip, where the triangle goes at a different angle (like the little hat triangle on the top bit) did I center it, because I decided the point of the triangle, in this case, needed to be centered on the square it was being attached to.  I don't think I took a close up of this part, but it is the center strip where the triangles on the end are turned sideways.

And then I sewed. And now, all the strips are sewn, and all the seams are pressed open, and I've laid out the square, and it looks like it might just, if I am very careful when I sew the strips together, line up properly. I cannot believe it.  But here it is, see for yourself.

JM, how's it looking? Can you believe I did all of this by hand? Without any proper quilting tools? Just me, a needle, and some thread. And not a single Project Runway episode in sight ; )

Now to join those strips together and declare this project done (I hope!)!!