Strips and More Strips!

Always anxious to see how things are going to look, I took the first strips sets and cut them into 3 inch squares and used the pattern to place them for one of the sleeves.  I definitely won't fade into the background!

I did notice that the center looked a little peculiar and then noticed a footnote on the pattern that said to take four of the blocks, cut off one of the strips and add a green in place.

.  Here I have taken the offending blocks out!

Ah, now that makes more sense!  As I mentioned, each of these strips starts out only 1 inch wide so each of those stripes is only 1/2 inch wide.  The thought of cutting all those 1 inch strips accurately was daunting so I went online and bought another one of the rulers that allows you to cut many strips at once without lifting up the ruler (it has slots).  I have one at home but use it so rarely, didn't think to bring it with me.  

It arrived today and is a little different than the one I have it home (more versatile) and it certainly helped me to cut these 195 strips in only about 1/2 an hour and very accurately!!  As I only had 1 inch left of one of the fabrics, it was well well worth it.  I had used one before back when I was cutting up fabric for knitting.  They are wonderful and will use it when I do another one of those Texas lone stars again.  So now all the strips are cut, I have a tape marking an accurate 1/4 inch on my sewing machine and am ready to go.

A few statistics though first:

1.  There are 195 1 inch strips
2.  There are 39 strips sets that I have to sew together
3.  These will produce 480 blocks ultimately
4.  This results in a jacket with 2400 individual pieces of fabric.

Now, my king sized Dear Jane probably only had twice that many pieces!!  Most of my quilts have nowhere near that many pieces!!  I think I must be crazy.