I love it...With a little help from the blogosphere

I am a copycat. Let's just get that out there, right up front. I saw this post over at Crazy Mom Quilts (one of my favorite blogs), which led me to this post, which just inspired the hell out of me. It looks like a few people are loving this pattern right now. I guess I'm just not very original, but I don't really care. Amandajean from Crazy Mom Quilts is always such an inspiration to me! So I set to measuring and cutting and sewing and ironing...and came up with this:



which eventually became this:



and turned into this:



After repeating the cutting, sewing, ironing, sewing, ironing, sewing, trimming 36 times, I ended up with this:



And I am psyched. I managed to sew straight lines and iron well and be patient. And it turned out the way I imagined. YAY! It took me a while to figure out how to lay the squares so that they may the right pattern. I don't know what it is about my brain, but it can really screw me up sometimes when I am looking at things. Which is funny because I always think of myself as a visual learner. I think that things go one way, I do them and they are wrong, wrong, wrong. Case in point:



Notice the one on the left is backwards- the wide parts of the square are all in the center, instead of on the edges. And it seriously took me like 5 minutes to figure out what the hell I did wrong. Niiiiice.

Some of the details:
I used a charm pack of Mary Englebright Recipe for Friendship and 36 white on white 5 inch squares for the squares. I made a template using the internet (I can't for the life of me remember where I got the instructions or I'd link it here...but Amandajean over at Crazy Mom Quilts has some good info here ). I used the cardboard backing from a charm pack, drew a line down the middle then measured 1/4" inch above and 1/4" below that line. I drew a line from 1/4" mark to 1/4" mark and cut the thing in half. I then had 2 templates, one for the bottom and one for the top. I cut all those damn squares in half with the templates and ended up with 8 bajillion little wonky rectangles, which I sewed into the foundation squares. I just sewed them all at once, in a continuous chain thing (see the first picture). It was loooooong... I then matched them up with each other (same colors together) to make the windmills/whirlygigs. They definitely needed some trimming. By the time I trimmed them all up, I had squares that were about 8 inches. Some were smaller, some were bigger, but most were around 8 inches (I'm just not a perfectionist about this stuff...sorry). I pressed most of the seams open so that there wouldn't be a lot of bulk.

Anyway, now I want to quilt it, myself. I've recently secured a bolt of batting (sidenote: its fricking HUGE, 40 yards of batting is B.I.G.- I don't recommend this if you don't have the storage space. I had a brilliant idea to store it in a large plastic storage container- ahhh, NO...way too big) and I am planning on trying to machine quilt this one myself. I won't be doing any stippling or fancy stuff, just some straight lines. I am nervous because I love this top so much but I have to try sometime! I don't know when I will be brave enough to do this, but I'm sure gonna try...I'll make sure to post the results- disastrous or not!

Enjoy this lovely Sunday with someone you love!