Some people who are making this quilt do all the blocks in order from top left to bottom right, but for me, that leaves too much room for procrastinating if I don’t feel like working on the “next” block. So, I’ve been assembling the blocks in no particular order – just choosing one that strikes my fancy each time.

I started out with some easy blocks to get used to the small size of the blocks and sharpen my somewhat rusty hand piecing skills. Then I started throwing in a few intermediate difficulty blocks, and eventually I tackled my first triangle. Now I’m mixing it up, trying to do enough of different skill levels and different shapes that I don’t end up with all advanced difficulty triangles to do at the end.

At one point, I made it my mission to finish all the blocks in Row J, thinking I could start sewing that row together. Once I really thought about it, though, I realized that if I assembled each row and then sewed the rows together, I’d have 12 seams that were each over 5 feet long. No big deal on the sewing machine; sounds extremely daunting when sewing by hand. I quickly abandoned the “finish individual rows” plan.

Now I’m planning to divide the center of the quilt (the 13×13 grid of square blocks) into nine sections of 4×4, 4×5, or 5×5 blocks. This keeps my seams shorter, so I only have to do two humungous seams at the end. And as it turns out, now that I’ve finished this block, I only have 3 more blocks to complete in order to finish all the blocks in the lower right corner of the quilt (K10 through M13).

Recently I purchased a new-to-me QuiltCut2 that I’m itching to use, but I don’t have any quilts in the “mass cutting out of pieces” stage. Since the Dear Jane quilt is a sampler, there isn’t really enough economy of scale (enough pieces of the exact same size) to justify setting up and learning how to use this nifty new tool … except for the sashing strips that go between each block. Now I have my motivation to complete those last 3 blocks in the lower right corner, so I can try out my snazzy new cutting system and produce some sashing strips.

This block was marked as an intermediate difficulty block, but it was actually a fairly simple one. Hopefully the other three remaining ones in this section won’t be too bad either. I chose a fairly simple block this time for two reasons.

First, I was planning to do an advanced difficulty triangle for my next block, and I wanted to conserve my energy a bit before tackling that challenge. I know, I just said I was going to focus on those last three blocks in the lower right corner, but I know if I don’t keep tossing those triangle blocks in the mix, I’ll never get them done.

Second, I had already completed one Dear Jane block early in August, and I really wanted to complete two blocks in a single month for a change. The first one, an extremely simple beginner block, somehow took me a week and a half to get done, but then I knocked out this more complicated one in only four days. Mission accomplished – two blocks in August.

Along with the two blocks, I completed the other components of my UFO Challenge – stitching 4 leaves and 2 berries on my wholecloth quilt, and prepping the rainbow quilt for quilting:

Since I’ve finished sewing together all the rows of the rainbow quilt, I’m modifying the UFO Challenge for the rest of 2021. In August, my rainbow quilt goal was to prepare the quilt for quilting; for September-December, the goal will be some number of quilting motifs (just like the wholecloth quilt). I’m not sure how many yet; we’ll see what my pace is like for September. I’m wanting to come up with a number of motifs that represents 2-3 hours of quilting time, but I haven’t gotten a chance to work on the rainbow quilt yet in September.

Just like how I choose the order to do the blocks in randomly, the order of the UFO Challenge components really varies from month to month. In July I finished the rainbow quilt task in the first few days, worked on the wholecloth quilt in the middle, and spent the whole darn month trying to finish one Dear Jane block. In August, I got the Dear Jane block done relatively early, spent one painful weekend in the middle of the month crawling around on the floor basting the rainbow quilt sandwich together, and got the wholecloth quilt motifs and a second Dear Jane block done in the last few days of the month.

The first few weeks of September have been devoted almost exclusively to that advanced difficulty triangle, which I just wrapped up this weekend. It’s cool having three parts to the challenge, so I can pick up whichever one seems most appealing that day. As long as they all get done, it doesn’t matter what order I do them in. We’ll see what strikes my fancy next, in the 11 days remaining this month.