"Across The Spectrum's" Grand Layout

One of the nicest quilt shops is The Golden Gese ( http://www.goldengesequilts.com/ ) on 22 Liberty Street in Concord, New Hampshire (famous for their large selection of Civil War fabrics). I called Nancy Gesen, the owner, and asked, if there was not a class scheduled for today, might I use their workroom table for a quilt layout? Nancy is such a sweetie! She welcomed me right in!

You may recall that I've spoken of Nickelswap and the tiny little Civil War 5" Criss Cross blocks we traded all winter. They are for Sherri Bain Driver's quilt, "Across The Spectrum" which appeared in McCall's Quilting, Jan/Feb 2011. In the article that featured the quilt, Sherri gave instructions on just how to set up a swap. It was perfect for a nickelswap project! By using the swaps, I got so many different blocks of the 162 needed.

Above shows where I was after about an hour of laying out the 5" blocks; a criss-cross block alternated beside a plain unsewn Civil War print block. The idea of the quilt is is get the color groups to flow one into another. It was quite challenging!!!
Nancy was minding the store but would come and look in on me and snapped this picture for me.

Her classroom worktable is the best-ever space! The cutting table that was right behind me held all the shipping envelopes stuffed with blocks and bags of plain squares, too.

It took me about 3 1/2 hours to layout the whole thing. Can you believe that I had stupidly left my pattern instructions at home??? Sigh. I had looked the pattern over just before leaving the house and left it by my chair. But everything was pretty fresh in my mind, so I just decided to go with the flow!

My quilt will be 17 blocks across by 17 blocks down as a square, whereas Sherri Bain Driver's design was for 17 X 19. I knew I had quite a few extras!!! Oh well. I'll tell you that I almost felt seasick doing this layout because there were an overwhelming number of subtle color decisions. I was tired. My back ached. My feet hurt. My injured ankle was complaining. I wanted to pick it all up and go home!

Above shows the slips of numbered paper pinned onto the upper left corner of the left-most, or first, block in each row just before I stacked them across. Don't you love my traveling tuna can pin tray? It works and if I lose it, it is no matter, so I love it.
One of the most fabulous things that happened was meeting Kate Sullivan who had just popped in to shop. She saw me and recognized me from this blog! She is a follower of mine and a fellow quilter. Here is a picture of Kate, on the left, getting good advice from Nancy Gesen, the shop owner, on the right. It was so wonderful to meet Kate and give her a big bear hug in person!

On the way home, I passed through young Bob Potter's farm on Stage Road in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, and the cows were out with their calves. I couldn't resist:

I  was so happy to get home and rest!