Back on Night & Day

Today I'm linking to Design Wall Monday at Patchwork Times.

I have to confess that I've gotten seriously waylaid lately making a gazillion small projects - oven hot pads, lots and lots of handbags, lots of pillows, lots of fabric flower brooches - but now Night & Day is back on my design wall.

The last time I did a paper piecing project was a few weeks ago when I was sewing together the label block for Southern Rhapsody, which was a small version of one of the quilt blocks and it was paper pieced. I made a startling discovery ... at least it was startling to me. Instead of sewing on a piece of fabric then jumping up to go to the ironing board to iron it, then going to the cutting table to cut it and add the next piece, then back to the sewing machine ... well, you get the picture - for a block with 96 pieces that 96 jump-up-&-down trips. When doing the label block, however, I discovered that it's just as fast to work on all the block sections at one time instead of each block section individually, so it's 12 jump-up-&-down trips instead of 96. I'm not explaining this well ... but believe me, it saved a lot of physical energy - didn't save any time, just physical energy.

Anyway, I have 11 more blocks to piece together on Night & Day. It will be a lap quilt and will be surrounded by a black border - I haven't decided yet whether or not to do the binding in black or white. I'm also toying with the idea of adding a thin strip of piping between the blocks and the border. I think it might make everything "pop" just a little more. I'm really digging the black & white though.