Fatal Error

Fair time is coming up very soon. I'm going to be gone the week before the fair starts so I have to have everything ready to go a week early. Plus this year the fair is as early as it ever could be. All this is to say, I've been feeling the crunch.

Sometime on Friday I realized that this was my last weekend to get the quilt block done for the raffle quilt. You may recall you buy a fabric pack for $5 and make a block in the chosen theme. This year's is Great Lakes lighthouses.

I had an idea early on but had not done anything about it...until recently. I sat down with a ruler, some scrap paper and some pencil crayons and made an initial sketch:

The entire block needs to be 12"x12". Although the drawing above is not quite to this scale, I decided to go with 8"x8" for the larger subsquare in the lower right corner and 4"x4" for the upper left corner.

I drew out a mariner's compass design myself (that's the "star" in the upper left), but wasn't very happy with the fact that I wasn't getting it very symmetrical. So today I went to the computer and found two very suitable designs.

The one I chose is from Carol Doak. (Pattern link here.) I figured out how to scale it on my printer and printed out copies onto some tearaway paper-piecing paper.

I pulled out my supplies and set myself up in my sewing corner.

And started cutting the fabric (no going back!) and piecing the mariner's compass blocks. Here is the first one:

I was a little scared about running out of fabric (you don't get very much of each) but at some point decided not to worry about it since the worst that could happen is that I'm out $5 and don't get to enter the quilt block contest at the fair. I should be able to live with that, right?

So once I had the first one done and figured it was good, I made the other three all at once. Here they are "dry fit" together:

(I still have to finished the centers of the last three, but you get the general idea.)

As I was taking this last picture, I realized that something was wrong. Very wrong. Fatally wrong. I had wanted the entire mariner's compass to be 4"x4". But I had made each of its blocks 4"x4". That makes the whole thing 8"x8", not 4"x4".

Head meet desk.

Again.

Again.

Since I was quitting for the night anyway, I didn't even think about attempting to fix it tonight. This, at least, explains why I was using so much fabric, but I don't know what I'm going to do.

Except go have what passes for beer around here. And pick up some comfort knitting to make me feel competent again.

And probably lay awake tonight thinking about it.