ambitious quilt start

I did this color chart of fabric a while ago. Sunday night I finally started the quilt! It feels a little bit like a great journey has started. There were a few activation barriers I had to get over to get going. First, was wrapping my head around all the fabrics and how they mapped onto what was in the pattern. That I accomplished in February by making myself a little chart using snips of each fabric and some glue. 

Second was the fact that I am kind of intimidated by the very large cut of background fabric I have. The thought of cutting it into tiny pieces is not the best because that seems like an awful lot of work! Thankfully the instructions pretty clearly help you stage this process by the type of block and corresponding size of quilt you are making. When I realized I could do that by block design and not have to do it all at once, that was a much smaller problem. So I went ahead and got started on one of the simpler blocks. There are two stages of cuts - one for larger pieces and the second to subcut the individual pieces for each block. These are my piles of first stage cuts for the nine aloe blocks.  

I chose the aloe first because it seems like the simplest. It also has just two colors in it, so I felt like I could keep track without needing to label anything. The cutting is indeed detailed - some of the strips were different by just a quarter of an inch! And this will take precise piecing. This first aloe turned out a little bit less wide than it was supposed to even though I thought I was using a scant seam. Thankfully the width was easily remedied with some elbow grease and the iron. Still, go scanter. 

It will be interesting to see how this goes. I'm certain it will be slow. I'm also certain to learn a lot in the process about myself, my sewing tendencies, and my preferences. Avanti!