Fiber Monday - compulsive quilting

Last week I shared all the quilt pieces I had cut out because I was suddenly consumed with making the Sparrows quilt. By the next day I had made one of the blocks. 

The instructions don't have you make one block at a time, instead they are written to make all 24 in assembly line fashion. Because I had everything cut out and labeled, that is what I decided to do. I wasn't quite sure how I would store all the pieces, so this would get it off the studio table as well. 

For this past week I have pretty compulsively worked on this. It happens sometimes that I get an idea in my head and need to drop everything to focus on the idea. This was one of those times. 

As of this afternoon I have all the blocks nearly completely finished. 

This is a much bigger quilt than I had thought. The blocks in the above photo are overlapped in order to fit on the table. They will also be wider when they are finished. 

The fabric in the birds that seems as though it's tan is actually green. It didn't come out well in the photo.

The block on top is the finished one. You can see the rest are missing the tail section. My goal is to finish them tomorrow and then put it away for a while. (I have weaving for the holiday market that I absolutely need to start thinking about.) I also need to pause this project because the pattern calls for sashing in between the blocks. I don't have anything in my stash which would be appropriate, so I am going to have to purchase that as well as backing fabric. I'll need some time to plan that into the budget. And I need to think about something different. 

So after the week of almost solely focusing on this, what have I learned?

1. I think I enjoy making one block at a time instead of in assembly line fashion. Because of how the colors are different, it was definitely easier to figure out that bit all at the same time. I think I would approach the whole thing a little differently were I to do it again, including having a storage plan before I start cutting. 

2. While I like the scrappy aspect of the blocks, it was very challenging to get seams and edges to line up because of the very disperate weights of fabric I was using. I decided that the less than pristine piecing was part of the scrappy aspect and not worry about it. If the blocks were done in solids, the lack of precision would be more evident. This was particularly true with regard to the half square triangles because the biases all behaved differently.

3. I will definitely pay more attention to fabric structure when a pattern involves triangles.