Piecing things back together

Quilting is such an odd craft.  Unless you are making a scrap quilt, or one specially designed to use fat quarters or strips to start, you generally begin with big pieces of fabric.  Step two is to cut all that lovely fabric into smaller pieces. Step three is to sew them back together in a different way, gradually working it back into...a very big piece of fabric.

Odd, that.  Makes quilters sound slightly mad.  Which, come to think of it, may be a bit true.

Last spring I snagged a bargain quilt kit from my favorite on-line quilt shop.  Between summer heat and autumn diversions, I've not been able to get back to working on it since this picture was taken.  Until this week, that is.  The rows are assembled, and I've begun the process of attaching them to one another.

What you see here are the two shortest rows; the rows on this quilt run on the diagonal, gradually increasing from a single block row (with setting triangles on either end) to a whopping nine block monster in the center.  The pattern then mirror decreases down to the opposite corner.  Since this picture was taken, most of the center of the quilt and the stepping stones border have been pieced.  While I've added borders to several round robin quilts that were this large, this is the largest quilt I've pieced from start to finish.  Thanks to large, simple blocks, it hasn't taken that long.

More pictures will come once the top is complete.  Where it will go from there is a bit of a puzzle; can I really squish up a queen size quilt enough to push it through my home sewing machine to quilt it?  The irony here is that, unlike the other four five six quilt tops I have stacked up, I know exactly what design I want to use to quilt this one.  Not to mention the fact I don't feel like paying a nickel a square inch (the quilt is 101" x 101") to have someone with a longarm machine do it for me.

Stay tuned for further developments.