Hawaiian Coins: Sewing Has Begun

After spending several days gathering fabric for Hawaiian Coins, I started sewing yesterday.

Here are the "keepers" that made the cut for the quilt.  About half are from stash.

Left: Standbys if needed.  Right:  Sorry, not this time.

I figured I needed 20 coin sections, each 6" x 16.5" unfinished.  There are some batiks that I want to feature prominently, to give the quilt the Hawaiian feel.  Each of those would account for 3 coin sections.  I still had lots of fabrics left.  I decided to use as many as possible, cut 7" strips and sewed together several sets of three.

One set of 3 strips

All five of the 3-strip sets

My next step is to stack alternating batiks and strip sets, four layers deep.  Then I'll make horizontal cuts at 2.5" wide.  With that done, I should be able to use a Stack the Deck technique to mix the horizontal cuts so I get a variety of fabrics when the horizontal slices are sewn together.

Fabric for the back

I was hoping to find an airplane fabric for the back of the quilt.  Why airplane?  Airplane!, a silly movie from the 80's, is my favorite movie.  If I remember correctly, Dave likes the movie, too.  So the airplane is an inside joke from me to him.

I found one fabric possibility at Equilter, but I really liked the one above which I found at Ebay.  The seller had 4 fat quarters available.  I needed much more than that to cover the back of the quilt.  Before I bid, I asked the seller if there was any writing on the selvage.  I was hoping to find more of the fabric elsewhere on the internet.  She said there's nothing on the selvage.  After spending hours searching the Web, I gave up.  I bought 2 fat quarters, cut as a half yard, from the Ebay seller, and I'll have to find some other fabric--probably a solid--to surround it.  The fabric is coming from Canada, and I'm crossing my fingers that it will arrive within a week.

More sewing in store today!