Tuesday Stitchers blog import: CQJP preparations

Well, for the past several weeks I have been focusing my creative energy on getting my sewing space all cleaned up and organized for the New Year so that once I get started stitching, it will be in an orderly, productive, enjoyable atmosphere. Trust me, this has taken a whole *LOT* of energy and creativity!! In the process of all this moving things around and rearranging things, I seem to have misplaced my favorite little digital camera. ARGH!!!! I had it on December 8, and now I don't have a clue where it is!

It is probably hiding behind the scissors. <-- longstanding household jibe: I have several pair of scissors. One friend once asked me whether I buy a pair of scissors per project. ...of course, she only has ONE pair of scissors, and they're not even very good for cutting paper. :P ...so, since then, whenever I misplace something, my DH suggests, "Maybe they're behind the scissors" and I'd have to reply, "Yes, but which pair?"
... hmm... I wonder whether that joke was worth explaining.

So what that means is that I got distracted from my organization-of-sewing-room task long enough to locate my old (now back-up) camera (that I carry with me on things like camping trips in case it gets dropped or lost), the camera's battery, charger, cable to talk to the computer, etc, etc, etc.

Now at least I can take pictures again! yay!

But that also means that my sewing room isn't quite clean yet. Here's what the room looks like today:


See all the clutter on the floor? All that clutter needs to be sorted, boxed, and put up onto shelves. I'm not even going to show you what the room looked like BEFORE I started this cleaning spree! ..I didn't think to take a picture. But when the sorting is finished and the floor is clear, it will be a nice little space to work in! Yay!!

Nonetheless, I did not let the cleaning spree completely derail me from the project preparation! I found time (and access to my sewing tools) to run a test to find out how much extra length I would need to add to my tail wedges to get them to qualify for the CQJP (which needs to be 36 sq inches per month)


I cut each wedge out of a different piece of fabric to represent the CQ wedges, and then cut a body wedge template out of sketch paper and overlaid the body onto the tail fan. See how much of the centermost wedge the body covers? Yep, that's my problem. If each wedge were unobstructed, my wedge size would already be perfect, but because of the overlap of body on tail, part of each wedge gets blocked, and the centermost wedge gets blocked the most.

Fortunately, there is a fairly simple way (that doesn't involve a whole lot of complex geometry!) to figure out how much extra space I need to add to each tail wedge:


I placed my clear acrylic grid ruler onto my tail wedge, with one edge of the ruler at the center-line of the wedge, and counted each full inch that showed through the ruler, plus partial inches paired-up to create full inches. This picture shows that there are 11 full inches, plus enough partial inches to add up to another 4 full inches in half of the tail wedge for a total of ((11+4)*2) 30 full inches. I need 36 full inches, so I need to add another 2 inches of diameter to my tail wedges 10 or so full inches of CQ space! ha! I do not suck at this math/geometry thing after all! ;)

I am still super excited about this project and am eagerly anticipating the arrival of the New Year!