I have good news and I have bad news

 

The good news is that I found an inexpensive way to turn my sewing table into a cutting table.  I use a standard 6-foot folding table for my sewing and cutting.  It’s the perfect height for sewing, but even as short as I am, it’s too short for comfortable cutting.  After lunch and as I was heading to my sewing area to do some more sub-cutting, it occurred to me that I could raise that table by the use of … standard bed risers.  Our Home Depot had them … 4 for less than $10.  I couldn’t believe the difference they made!  I was able to finish my sub-cutting by mid-afternoon … I was sure that it would take me until tomorrow to get the sub-cutting done.

Here’s my little sewing area … with my table raised thanks to the bed risers. 

 

While I was taking this photo, I thought I’d share my sewing/cutting table in the middle of my sub-cutting this afternoon.

Yes, I need extra task lighting … accurate cutting is critical in achieving accurately-sized blocks/quilts … and my eyes aren’t what they used to be, and plenty of good lighting helps. 

 

The bad news is that as I was just getting ready to start sewing the first block together this afternoon, I realized that I had cut twice as many white-blue-white strips as I need and half as many blue-white-blue strips I needed.  Which means that I have all those strips sub-cut that I cannot use … and worse yet, I’ve used white fabric for those sub-cut strips that I need for the 6 1/2” x 6 1/2” solid blocks and for the border strips.    So, now I’ll rip out those mis-sewn sub-cuts and resew them into blue-white-blue sub-cuts.  And I’ll have to get some more white fabric for my solid white blocks and border strips.  What aggravates me most is the time wasted – the time I spent charting out how many strips to cut (my calculations were accurate … but had the colors reversed), the time I spent sewing strips together and sub-cutting them, and the time I’ll spend ripping apart the mis-sewn sub-cuts.