Well! THAT'S finally done!

Gah!! The first big assignment of the semester is the biggest one of the entire semester, and at last, I have finished grading it!

That big whooping noise you might have heard yesterday just after 6pm likely was me beginning my celebration.

I purposely build my classes to get this intimidating assignment out of the was first - both for my students and myself. From here on out, grading will be a cakewalk compared to this one.

Because of the school work, I have very little to share on the blog today. I did spend Saturday sewing here with Sharon, and I have all my jelly roll blocks finished as a result of that. We laid them out on the bed to see the final effect. Click here for when I began the JR quilt.

This picture looks busy at first glance because I have a star quilt on the bed with a large patchwork pillow. I placed my red and white jelly roll blocks right on top -- and of course, Gracie had to get involved.

At this point, I'd made 20 red blocks with white chains and 20 white blocks with red chains for a total of 40 blocks. Where Gracie is standing is a perfect spot for two more blocks, one of each, so I have now made those for a current grand total of 42 blocks. The quilt will be 6 blocks wide and 7 blocks long.

I have made a change -- correcting those 4 blocks in which I'd put the 4-patch part in the center. (click here for the pictorial of that) I was thinking it wouldn't make any difference, but as I laid out the blocks, it did interfere with the (very) subtle secondary pattern that emerges. Unsewing and making them right didn't take too much time, and I'm glad I did it.

By the final few blocks, I was running out of the original partial jelly rolls of La Vie en Rouge by French General/Moda. If you know French General, you know that all their lines play so very well together, so I dug into my FG remnant tub for suitable additions. That tub is quite full, and I could end up making more blocks, but then my quilt would not qualify as a "jelly roll" quilt. I think I will stop here, ending up with a nice-sized lap quilt - a true jelly roll quilt, in other words.

I tell you, the weirdest thing - when both Sharon and I looked at this quilt we could not see those diagonal lines at all. The blocks just looked like a big mess. But through the camera, the diagonals were so pronounced. Isn't that strange? How can a camera view change a quilt so much from a direct eye-view?

I am glad to be back in action here on the blog. Hopefully the rest of the semester will be easier to manage.

Happy Quilting, Friends!