I won an award!

For being the world's laziest blogger. For real. I have thought about it nearly every day, but getting to the computer was hardly on the reality agenda.

First off, school is amazing. I should say "class", because I'm only taking the one, but I'm really enjoying it and have met some truly awesome people. I was having a hard time downloading my textbook, but I finally got it to work this weekend and have been catching up on my homework. Luckily, most of our work is done in class.

Baby still isn't here, which is good, because the blanket is no where near done. However, I did decide how I was going to connect the flowers and have been working away at that.

Here are step-by-step photos of the process by which I prepare the fabric for making Grandma's Flower Garden.

I try to start at the edge of the paper. I always manage to get off center, though. Fortunately, it's not a terribly big deal if I do. You'll see why later.

I use the inside of one of my templates as a guide. 

Make a full page of hexagons. Then simply cut them out. I usually cut them into ziggy-zaggy strips then cut the cross lines. Seems to go pretty quickly. You can even use the ones that have wonky ends (see the left edge above) if you feel good about your basting skills.

Then I use one of them as a guide to make a cardboard template to use on the fabric.  I've made a quarter inch seam allowance. The cardboard sheets that come inside fat quarters are really handy for this (and a thrifty re-use, too!).

I used a white washable fabric pencil to trace the shapes onto the fabric.

I used my rotary cutter and a ruler to first cut all the diagonal lines, then the the connecting lines...

...which made this cutting process quick as well.

I counted out the number of fabric hexagons and gathered enough freezer paper hexagons to go with them and headed to the ironing board.

The nice thing about freezer paper is that if it irons on crookedly... 

...you can peel it off and try again.

I've found that, if I lay out the pieces thusly, the ironing on of the freezer paper goes rather quickly.

In my next blog, I'll show you my quick basting stitches. I can really tell with which pieces I started out, because the basting stitches are all ferkucht.