Right angles, wrong angles

The elephant continues.  26 pieces complete, 71 to go.  As I go, I realize that this project leans entirely on my biggest weakness as a quilter, which is my complete lack of spatial intelligence.  Have you seen that spatial intelligence test where you look at a drawing of an object and then they show you four choices and you have to select the correct drawing of the object viewed from a different angle?  I have, and I probably scored worse than random guessing would have.  So taking a little triangle of fabric that I know will cover the intended space and then having to figure out how to angle the seam so that it actually covers the intended space is an exercise in frustration.  

Take 23C here, which is that gray piece sticking out in the position it had to be sewn in order to get the angle right.  (This is after it was trimmed down - I'm not so insane that I try to get things exact.)  So, if I've learning anything going forward, it's that if a piece has a wonky angle and yet isn't sticking out wonkily as I sew it down, it's probably wrong.  A handy rule of thumb, sure, but I don't seem to be improving much past that.  

Onward, elephant ho!  

Happy crafting! 

A Big Mountain

So, I've embarked on a project that is clearly going to take a long time.  This is a particularly straightforward journey, though, because I'm working off of a pattern and templates that I didn't create. 

This is the first several pieces of The Elephant Abstractions quilt, the kit for which was a birthday present this year.  And the finished quilt will be for my dad, who really loves elephants.  I finished Template #11 today, and there are... 97 total.  So, woo, only 86 to go!  Plod, plod, plod. 

I had never ever paper-pieced before, so there has been a learning curve.  Happily, using solids means that I don't have to keep front-side/back-side straight, because I guarantee I would have ripped out more than one seam by now if that weren't the case.  Sadly, until the last seam is sewn, I will be worried about running out of fabric, even though I'm sure that the amount of waste in this process was taken into account by the designer, and I could almost certainly track down more of what I needed, because I didn't sit on the kit for 20 years (why, hello, experience, thank you for letting me learn from you!). 

So, I hope to be pretty faithful to this project, which means the next several months will probably be more of the same picture above and a faint counting sound in the background.  Maybe I'll buy some fabric occasionally in order to have something else to talk about.  Yeah, that's the ticket. 

Why, here's some right now:

More birthday gifts!  Mostly Connecting Threads, several backing quantities, a background yellow for The Elephant (custard), and a banner print that was on clearance at Hawthorne Threads.  My husband finds the banner print deeply pleasing, so I plan to figure out some sort of patchwork thing that will work for a quilt for him.  (I'm thinking a checkerboard of different-colored solids.) 

Hope to get Template #12 in the can tonight, then onward to 13. 

Happy crafting!