We finally got our Jo-Ann materials in on Wednesday! Also, Olivia went over to Jo-Ann’s earlier in the week and got extra fabric because it was taking so long for our order to come in, so we had the material washed and starched the same day that our Jo-Ann package came in. Cheryl also lent us her suction cup ruler grip and her 24″ x 6″ transparent quilting ruler.

Fabrics we are deciding to use, missing in the photo is the pink and white zig-zag fabric you see later on in the project

So Olivia and finally was able to start on our exemplar!! 

So through out the process, we learned that having the proper and the right tools really makes all the difference. When we went into cutting our fabrics, Olivia went from using a (apparently too short) transparent triangle ruler that we ordered from Jo-Ann’s, to a metal yard stick that we found in the lab, to Cheryl’s ruler and gripper and it was a completely different experience.
So lesson learned: to make things go much more smoothly, it’s not a bad idea to invest in good tools. So again, thank you to Cheryl for saving the day!

Our completed squares for our quilt

So Olivia and I went ahead and prepped our squares with our (washed and starched) fabric so we can start laying out the pattern that we wanted. Below I posted some videos on how we went about cutting our fabric. But we talked it out on what sizes we wanted first and used measurements on both the quilting ruler and the cutting board and used those simultaneously as reference points on keeping our edges straight and measure the cutting.

We ended up cutting 24 6.5″ X 6.5″ squares for four different fabrics. Then we put them in this pattern that is showing to the right.  But as we were to go about how to put the boarders on each square, we were refreshing our memories by just
Googling different bordering techniques in quilting, and at the end of it, we decided to group 4 squares together for 6 13″ blocks made up of the 6.5″ X 6.5″ squares, with 2.5″ boarders along side the 6 blocks (and just keep in mind, this also including the sewing allowance, so they will not end with their initial cutting sizes when the quilt is complete).
We were pretty excited once we decided to go and do this technique, and it actually saved us quiet a bit of time because we didn’t have to border each and every square, instead we just cut 7 13″ x 2″ strips of our border fabric. And within just a little over two work days, we just about have the piecing of our our quilt complete! And the video below shows just how we sewed our pieces together into our blocks

Friday morning Olivia went a head and lined up our second half of our piecing (as be as we could) with the other already sewn half with the border. And we too the initivite to pin the dark purple borders up as much as we could.

Friday we finished piecing our quilt and ready to start incorporating Arduino!! Yay!