notes on designing for the Twister Tool

 This post is mostly self serving, since I have messed up on calculating yardage for TWO quilts now:

Use the first piecing dimensions for the border calculations, not the finished size!!!!

On both the Christmas table runner and Gillian's Christmas gift quilt, I made the border calculations on the *finished* quilt size, which is 3/4 of the size of the *pieced* quilt size.

This is such a great technique, but the fact that I've made the same mistake twice means I need a reminder to myself.

So far I've made this small quilt to test the technique, and it turned out great! However, it was totally slapped together and I didn't actually plan it out.

Gillian's Christmas gift quilt, that she's doing the piecing for, is going to be fantastic once we get it done. Right now she's almost done sewing the rows together, although in the photo below it's in the planning stages.

I failed to purchase enough black flannel from Missouri Star Quilt Company (where the layer cakes came from), but hopefully the local quilt shop will have a comparable flannel we can use for the inner border that has to be added before we make the twister cuts.

Gillian's quilt started with 10" squares.

My Christmas table runner is on hold until tomorrow when we'll run to the local quilt shop and hopefully they will still have another yard left of the fabric since it's a bigger version of the blue-and-white one, where the background and border need to be the same fabric. It's ridiculous--the finished one will be around 120" x 12". 

In this photo it's in three sections, although I've since sewn the three sections together:

My table runner started with two charm packs (5" squares), then I cut too many background squares (also throwing off my calculations for the border fabric), but hopefully it will all work out.

Cross your fingers for us. :-)  

OH, I forgot to say anything about my new design wall!

I'm finally organized enough to be able to use a design wall (things are unpacked, the area is cleaned out enough to access a big enough wall space, etc.) although the room is not clean by any stretch of the imagination. I have a LOT of stuff that I need to organize in a better way, but I'm getting there. Creativity is messy, and making a mess is faster than cleaning it up.

Anyway, the design wall is two 8' x 4' sheets of 3/4" insulation, and I trimmed 13" off one side so that it wouldn't cover the power outlet at the bottom of the wall.