Yes, today is in fact national quilting day. I'll be celebrating by working on my funky monkey quilt. I've missed those little monkeys!

I've cut and organized all the center and corner blocks.

(oh, here's the pattern I'm using)

And last night I started sewing all the strips together for the four-patches.

Many quilts made up of squares can be pieced together from strips of fabric. Yes, if crocheters are hookers, quilters are strippers! Like converting a knitting pattern to be worked in the round, sewing together strips and then cutting them into smaller units just goes much faster than the traditional method of working with a bazillion tiny pieces. Well, a bazillion may be exaggerating a bit. Let's do the math together, shall we? There are 27 strip sets in the picture above (that was 54 strips, sewn together in pairs). After pressing the seams, I spent about three hours cutting them into square pairs, getting about 8 from each strip set. Soooo, that's a grand total of 216 square pair units, which will make 108 four-patch units.

All told, that's over 300 cuts, but only 27 seams so far. Once I sew together the four-patch units, I'll have sewn 135 seams. If I'd done everything the traditional way, I'd have cut 432 individual squares, which would mean almost 500 cuts and over 300 seams.

Doesn't this sound like fun? Did I mention there were monkeys?