According to my calculations

I've talked about my love/hate relationship with math here before. It's not that I really love it or hate, actually, but more that I never really enjoyed it during school (and now in life, for that matter) but fortunately I wasn't that bad at it.

So, in working on the Timber quilt (talked about the super fast cutting process here), I had spent waaaay too much time trying to calculate how to arrange the blocks. I'm not a super picky person when it comes to layout, and without a design wall (read = no space), I tend to lay out quilt blocks on my bed, then stack and label the columns before piecing (and so that we actually sleep in the bed, heehee).

No matter what I did, I could not figure out a perfectly even layout for this quilt. It consists of the following:

100 4" blocks, plain cuts of all the prints
50 4" pinwheel blocks, 2 repeats
25 4" four square blocks

I don't use any sort of spreadsheet or quilting software, just plain old pen and paper (and a calculator!). Try as I might, I couldn't figure out a layout that really used all the prints in an evenly repeating/symmetrical/etc. pattern. Then I just decided, to heck with it, I'm going to alternate between the plain prints and the pieced blocks, trying not to put the same prints next to each other and we'll see how that works out.

Of course, that still came with a few obstacles in the form of left over blocks but over all I'm happy with it. It's going to be 12 x 12 blocks and the left overs will be used on the back (probably a strip of them and then the rest will be some sort of solid).

How do you do layouts???

They're all sorted into columns and labeled and I think I'll start piecing them tomorrow. For now, I'm off to finish up The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (and to be honest, I didn't really LOVE any of these but felt interested enough to read all three...anyone else feel the same?). Dinner tonight with friends at Momofuku Noodle Bar for their famous fried chicken dinner.

Here's to a good week!