Day Three of the Twelve Days of Christmas in July!

 Hi, all!

My subdivision won't allow us to have chickens, so unfortunately I can't provide three French hens for today's hop!  (But since it's Sunday, maybe I'll go get some fried chicken for lunch... yum!)  Instead, we have a blogpost from my friend Carole over at From My Carolina Home.  Carole's always doing fun things on her blog and I can't wait to see what she's up to.  I know that she's planning something with all this....

...and she'll share it all with you today and next Sunday.  Kind of a mini sew-along!  So hop on over there by clicking the name of her blog above and check out what's going on, then come back here for the next steps in our Christmas Tree quilt-along!

*&*&*&*&*&*&*

Today, we're going to take those strip sets you made yesterday and cross-cut them into 1.5" wide strips of red-white-red or white-red-white.  But before you jump right into that, I need to warn the wall hanging folks that there are some special instructions for them!  So hang on and read all the way through before you start cutting.

The first step is to lay out your strips for cutting.  I find that if I stack them on top of each other, I tend to get skewed cuts.  But if I lay them one above the other on my cutting board, as shown above, I can cut several at a time.  This makes the process go much faster.  Sometimes I have to regroup and re-align my strips halfway through, and possibly trim the left end again, but it's a minimal amount of waste and a huge savings in time!

First of all, trim off the left selvage edge.  As you can see, I failed to take my own advice about lining up the unprinted selvage edges but this is why I have that tip for you!  Then start cross-cutting your strips into 1.5" pieces. (Wall hanging folks, keep reading - there are special instructions for you below.)

See? They add up fast when you cut them this way!  You should get about 27 from each strip.  For the quilt, cut until you have 232 R-W-R strips and 116 W-R-W strips.

I put mine in separate containers sorted out by color to make assembly of the 9-patch blocks simpler.

Now for the wall hanging folks - you only have one strip set of R-W-R, and one strip set of W-R-W.  Each strip will yield 27 pieces, but you need 32 R-W-R pieces and 16 W-R-W pieces.  Here's how you'll do that!

Take your R-W-R strip and crosscut it into 27 pieces.

Now take your W-R-W strip and crosscut ONLY 16 pieces.

Set all of those to one side.  

Now grab your seam ripper and remove one of the white strips from the remainder of your W-R-W strip set.  You should now have a R-W strip set that is about 18" long.  Cut it in half so you have two R-W strip sets.

Sew the two together so you now have a R-W-R-W strip set.  Take your trusty seam ripper and remove the outer white strip.  Now you can cross-cut the new R-W-R strip set into the remaining five R-W-R pieces that you need!

It seems silly to sew the two strip sets together, then remove the white strip, but it is easier and your strip set will be straighter if you do it this way.

Now you should have 16 W-R-W sets and 32 R-W-R sets.  

And you are done for the day!

*&*&*&*&*&*&*

I hope you're progressing well on your quilt or wall hanging!  Come back tomorrow, when I'll share a quick and easy way to bring Christmas to your home decor, along with the next step in our quilt-along!

Hugs!

Sarah