zigzag quilt cont.

I realized after starting Brycen's zigzag quilt that I had pinned a yellow and gray zigzag quilt ages ago so I went to look at it here.  So I decided to do the second quilt in my plan that I blogged about last week here. I have purchased enough fabric for at least 2 of these quilts.

 Here are all of them;

I bought 1/2 yard of most of these fabrics, which is enough for 2 zigs of the same fabric. Each zig takes 2 3" cuts of fabric. If you do the math 3 X 2 = 6" which is quite a bit less than 1/2 yard. In fact 1/2 yard should give me 3 zigs, but it doesn't, unless the lady who cuts your fabric is more generous than the one that cut mine, 3" X 6"= 18" =1/2 yard but don't count on actually having 18" of fabric to work with. I had more like 16" from the half yard pieces once they were washed and straightened.

I finished cutting my fabric this morning. Turns out I'm only repeating about 3 of the fabrics.This is the actual layout;

Doesn't look very good does it? Here I managed to photograph all but 2 of the fabrics and import them into EQ7 BUT the fabrics look dull and muted to what they are in real life. This took a good bit of time which I was happy to do since I was ill and it made me feel like I was actually doing SOMETHING but I'm not ready to do it over since;

1. I feel better
2. I want to really DO something today.

So I have a plan;

1. lay them together in pairs ready to sew
2. cut them into their blocks today.

I started at the top; sew 1 yellow stripe to the fabric above it and 1 to the fabric below it. sew, press, sew, press, etc. for about 1.5 hours.

One of the tricks I do to help sew my strips  correctly.

• line them up along the left side so that any differences show up on the right side, near the needle. Since I cut both strips at 3" there should be no gray showing. So which one is 3"?
• Measure it and find out. And then sew using the correct edge. Here the yellow is the just shy of 3" so it is sewn ignoring the yellow. Another time it might be that the yellow is the 3" one and the gray would be ignored.
• This way I get my strips sewn together a bit more accurately. 

I have them sewn, pressed, and cut at 5.5. Now I'm trying to lay it out. Of course I won't know if I did it correctly until it is laid out completely.