#the100dayproject – halfway through

I’ve made it halfway through a 100 days project y’all!! Thought I’d do a little round up of my project and how it’s going. (This post is not affiliated, I’m just a superfan!)

To start all the way back at the beginning, I came across “curvelets” last summer on Instagram after seeing them posted by @feltlikesweets. He mentioned how addicting they were and he wasn’t wrong! I promptly ordered the little template set from Jen Carlton-Bailly of @bettycrockerass at her website here. She has a few different kit options that come with essentials and/or fabric. I just got the template since shipping the UK can be a total pain, so the easier the mail the better for me!

Curvelets for those that don’t know are little quarter circle blocks that finish at 1″ square. So full circles are 2″ finished. They’re teeeeny. Jen has great instructions that come with the templates, and has a few videos around that help with the basting process. Once you get that down it’s a little hand sewing, or machine sewing if you’re brave and impatient like my mom, a little ironing, and a little trimming.

I think I decided pretty early on that it would be fun to use just Ruby Star Society fabrics since all their collections use the same colours and mix and match so well! (It’s also an awesome excuse to buy charm packs of all their collections as soon as they come out!)

Once I made a few I decided rather than end up with 100 blocks to lay out and sew together “someday” I’d break it down into 8″x8″ blocks and worked out a system for keeping the number of quarter, half, and full circles even across what I was planning to be a throw quilt. Each quarter circle counts as a “unit” and each block is 64 units, so it breaks down into: 4 full circles (16 units), 8 half circles (16 units), and 32 quarter circles (32 units). This made it a lot easier to group curvelets into blocks and start making progress on another quilt that’s destined to be a forever project!

My initial plan was to do a quilt that was 7×8 blocks, so 56″x64″. That’s 3,584 units of curvelets, so I may scale it down and have a large wall hanging instead of a throw quilt!

Enter #the100DayProject! It’s a global art project that people take part in every year by choosing a project or practice to work on for 100 days. It’s a good way to build habits, get creating, practice a skill, or in my case, progress with a project I’d already started. I thought it was a good way to spend a bit of time on my Ruby Star curvelets without feeling like I had to drop everything else to work on it all the time for days.

It worked out perfectly that I could do 10-12 units a day for 6 days and put a block together on the 7th. This way I’m still getting blocks done, and still working on them everyday! I decided to post all my day progress photos in my Instagram stories and have been sharing the weekly blocks on my feed. (You can find my stories here if you’re interested in seeing the first 50 days! You’ll need to be logged into Instagram to see them though.) By doing a block a week I’ll have at least 20 blocks at the end of the 100 days and can decide from there what I want to do with them! (The project will add 14 blocks even if I only do a block a week!)

Here are the blocks I have so far:

I’ve enjoyed playing with the shapes you can get from a quarter circle template, so you’ll see those pop up in various blocks. The clamshell was the first beyond a circle I figured out, and then I figured out the apple core and was particularly excited!

Organisation is important! I first made a 4 Pocket Case by Aneela Hoey to hold everything related to my curvelets, but then the project got bigger and I spilled out into an IKEA Trofast tub. (I like to keep projects in these so that I can take the tub out and move it about, or leave it in a Trofast unit till I can get around to it! I’ll do a post on my sewing room organisation sometime!)

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I keep all my Ruby Star Society fabrics that are destined to be curvelets in the tub together. When I get a charm pack I split it out so at least one charm square of each print makes it into the curvelets project, and the others are kept to the side for other potential projects. (I also steal squares from that extras pile when I find I need more of a print for a curvelets block!)

You can see a lot of my favourite tools in the photo above, but here’s a list:

• Sewline glue pen for basting
• Karen Kay Buckley scissors, super sharp and the microserration helps with cutting small things!
• frixion pens for marking (the cactus pen is one I got from Nikki’s Supply Store and can frixion refills!)
• Clover Black Gold needles are my absolute favourite! They’re so sharp!
• Curvelets templates of course, the link to Jen’s shop is back at the top of this blog.
• 2.5″ square ruler from Omnigrid, perfect for the full circles, and makes trimming the quarter ones pretty easy as well. (not pictured)
• travel iron and wool mat for ironing next to my machine (not pictured, and don’t actually know the brand of mine, but it’s so handy!)
• Aurifil 50wt thread for piecing (not pictured, I have a spool that’s not got much left on it, so I’ve taken the bottom off and it fits in pouches better!)
• Some Speedy Vinyl Pouches by Aneela Hoey for organising bits that have been cut out already. (perfect size for holding the half and full circles, the quarter circle pieces just live in plastic baggies in their own feature/blender organisation!)
• a travel sized “design wall” that I made using a piece of wool blend batting. I drew a 1.5″ grid on it with a sharpie which makes laying out each 8″ block a lot easier. Also means I can play with a layout, then roll it up if I don’t have time to sew it together right then. You’ll see it in some of my videos, or in process block photos.

I’ve even made a few of my own templates to make fussy cutting easier! At first I would fold the fabric like Jen’s instructions for half and full circles, but trying to line up with a tiger or horse was tricky and the templates I made from some template plastic helped so much.

Hope you’ve enjoyed reading a bit more about my project! I’m hoping to do some more blogs on my curvelets in the near future, specifically on how I make the other shapes! If you want to keep up with my curvelets blog posts, or other sewing endeavours you can follow me on my social platforms at the bottom of the page, or sign up to my email newsletter here: