Keeping Organized

Keeping organized as your cutting out pieces for a quilt will help save you time and frustration later when your sewing. 

I am sewing up a queen size quilt that has plenty of pieces. I do all my rotary cutting on my dinning room table and then need to move all those pieces upstairs to my sewing room. To keep all my pieces neat and together, I use a tray to hold everything as I cut them out. That way, I can easily transfer the pieces to my sewing room, move them around my limited sewing space once there and not risk misplacing any pieces.

Here are my blocks I have pieced for my queen size quilt. I am making my Prairie Flower quilt. (download free project at Fabri-Quilt.com)

Since this quilt is made up of seven different block color combinations, the placement of the blocks needs to be carefully thought out. In this sort of quilt, I like to take a picture of the block placement before I start sewing the blocks together. I have a habit of turning things around and forgetting where things go when I carry the blocks from one room to the other to sew them together. Now, if I get mixed up, I can simply refer to my photograph of the projects block placements.

Here is another little snippet for keeping track of the block placement when sewing the blocks together in rows. Again, since I am moving blocks from one room to the next, I like to take the row with me to the sewing machine. I place the two blocks that need to be sewn together, right-sides together and place one pin along the edge to be sewn. That way I know which end is up and what goes to what. I can refer to my photograph then to get the pairs sewn together in the right order. I then replace this sewn row to the laid out quilt blocks to be pieced and sew another row, one row at a time.