Do-Over

It became apparent to me over the weekend the reason I am not a quilter; I am hating sewing this sodding blanket together*. I had a good plan, I thought, but it ended - as many plans do - in swearing and crawling around on the floor all over again .

 Remember how I laid it all out so carefully:

Well, then I loosely tacked each strip together, and the intention was to sew the squares into strips, and then sew each strip together. This didn't work at all. A horrendous three strip long mess of puckering and mis-matched corners (so awful in fact that I didn't even take a picture) was enough to convince me to begin again.

I laid everything out for a second time, this time with all the squares in it, so that was novel at least!:

And then I did a really hi-tech** chart of each set of bigger squares (where they existed, as it's 9x7 they aren't all squares, obviously) and smaller rectangles, and poor little square 20 which is all on its own.:

Then I loosely joined all the squares (or rectangles) together, while taking regular breaks to find the next episode of Amanda Vickery's 'History of Private Life' on the iPlayer, and as I did this I thought of all the other women through the ages who had cursed their abysmal quilting skills.

I gave each square a new label to say which direction 'bottom left' is, so hopefully avoiding further confusion when I sew it together:

Now I'm sewing each of the sets of squares together (a bit more loosely, for puckering avoidance). Once that's done I'll sew and sew until I have bigger squares, and eventually a blanket. So far it's going a lot more smoothly, though I'm pretty sure it's impossible to avoid a bit of ripply-ness, I suspect it's to do with how I did the m1 in the squares to start with, and ripping it back that far ain't going to happen. I'm also considering that an i-cord border might not work on this, I think it needs something a bit less rigid. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

*there was much worse swearing than this...
**back of a piece of old calendar, reuse recycle etc...