The outpouring of support (and fabric!) from friends and fellow quilt guild members has been overwhelming – it’s great to be part of such an awesome quilting community. I still have a few more fabrics coming in from different sources, but I’ve already found quite a few replacements. I’m in much better shape than I was last week, fabric-wise.

Unfortunately, I’ve been forbidden to iron for the next two weeks (bowling league finals are coming up, and ironing exacerbates my arthritis). So, I’ve been casting around for other ways to make progress.

This weekend I found a new feature in the Dear Jane software: you can indicate which fabric will be used for each patch, and then it will show you exactly how much of each fabric you need to make your quilt.

When I originally put Paulette’s design in the software, I just specified the colors for each block, not indicating which specific fabrics to use for each.

With some of my fabric destined to remain un-ironed for two more weeks, I spent the weekend scanning in all of my fabrics so I could plug them in to the software and know for sure how much I needed.

It was definitely a worthwhile exercise, because I found that I actually had enough extra yardage of fabrics from Paulette to replace some of the missing fabrics. Specifically, all those missing medium-light green fabrics were not as vital as I thought. She had so many fabrics in this color that were only used for a single block, but she had at least 1/4 yard of each one, so there was plenty to make multiple blocks from each fabric if necessary.

I also found the reverse to be true: there were some colors where I wasn’t missing any fabrics, but I didn’t have enough of them to make all the blocks I wanted to. I wasn’t missing any of Paulette’s olive green fabrics, for example, but she hadn’t purchased enough to account for the triangle blocks I wanted to do in this color. So, I’m still on the lookout for a couple of fat quarters in olive green.

As I was plugging in the fabrics, I also noticed that Paulette’s placement of fabrics meant some large-scale prints were wasted on tiny patches, and small-scale prints were boring repeated across larger patches.

Either that, or I haven’t been holding her sample layout right side up all this time.

At any rate, I ended up mapping out all the blocks for each color, and moving the fabrics around a bit. You can see one of my low-tech diagrams in the picture above. Yes, my secret’s out – now the world knows that I can’t draw diamond shapes worth a damn.

This mapping process helped with keeping the fabric-scale coordinated with the size of the patches. It also helped with the overall fabric yardage. If the blocks I had planned to make with a particular fabric would require 3/8 yard and I only had 1/4 yard, I could swap fabrics around to different blocks until the totals came out right.

I felt somewhat guilty about deviating from Paulette’s choices, and then I got a sweet email from Donna (the woman who donated the kit to me). Without her even knowing that I was guiltily rearranging things, she mentioned that she and Paulette’s daughter both wanted me to feel free to put my own stamp on this quilt.

I’m pleased with the new fabric placement, and now that I’ve got the okay from Paulette’s own daughter, I’m excited to get started.

The only obstacle at this point is that the light green fabric I want to use for my first block is still in the unwashed pile. I need to find a loophole in that pesky ironing ban … it can’t be that difficult to iron left-handed, right?