Oriental Tiles

I started cutting out this quilt at the end of January.  It's a commercial pattern, designed by Ursula Riegel and I think it will really be pretty made with these fabrics I've chosen.

Lots and lots of pieces!  Three hundred pieces, to be exact.  All stacked up in neat little piles.  I finally got back to this project this week and started the sewing.  Here's what it looked like when I was getting started.

The reason there are so many pieces is that each big piece has four corner triangles.  No one wants to sit and draw that many lines.  There is another way to do it!  I drew a line on a piece of masking tape and lined it up with the needle on the sewing machine.  Each small square is lined up on the corner of a larger piece.  The machine needle is lowered into the exact corner where the sewing begins and as I sew across the square I make sure that the opposite corner travels up the marked line.  Like this:

I still have a ways to go, but I have enough sewn to give a good hint as to where this is going.

Currently I am teaching a beginning quilting class here at the store one day a week, finishing the hand quilting on a bed-size quilt, working on a new pattern design and just itching to work on a couple other ideas rattling around in my head.  There is never time to be bored!