Potholders

I made these potholders a few weeks ago, and am about to make some more.

I played around with lots of things -- they're the best size for practicing, and you get something useful in the end, too. The one on the right is quilt as you go, and the one on the left was quilted after I pieced the top. They both have different types of bindings and different loops. It's easier to see the loop styles on the back.

The next set (I'm about to make another pair) will have a combination of the binding method on the left and the loop method on the right. Any suggestions for filling? I used a layer of Insulbrite with a layer of 100% cotton batting. I was thinking of trying a double layer of old towels -- has anyone tried that?

James

The letters are now a word, a name! Joining the letters into a word is my favorite part of word play -- so many options! Well, one of my favorite parts -- I like choosing the fabrics, and deciding on variations, and ... you get the idea. :) The little A in my last post was just too small, so I made a bigger one. My pile of extra letters is growing, and most of them seem to be A's. Any relative or friend with that initial could be in luck!

I love using the pattern in a fabric to make a border. I just measured 1/4" away from the line along the circles and cut, and stitched right on the line. You can see the 1/4" on the left side that will be in the seam once I stitch the backing fabric around the name.

Otto has a baby brother

Yes, indeed, it's been awhile since I've been in blogland, and I hope to catch up with you all soon. I have quite a few quilting projects underway!

Remember little Otto? I made him a trip around the world quilt, then decided to put his name on the back, then decided to play a little...until the back became the front! You can see the quilt I made for Otto here.  Well, he's a big brother now!

Little brother gets a match game I Spy quilt -- two squares of each fabric. And can you guess what his little brother's name is?

Sweet baby James -- remember James Taylor's song? I used Tonya Ricucci's wonderful Word Play Quilts book to make the letters! You'll see tomorrow what I did with the name.

A few things

I picked up some irresistible scraps from a big bin at a homewares store the last time I visited DD1 in Berkeley. Small pieces, big prints, no way I could think of to use them. How about fussy cutting a house for Victoria's donation quilt?

I hope to get another house made tomorrow.

Since I mentioned recently that I am into piano key borders, I thought I'd share a photo of a Project Linus quilt we made.

A guild member with an AccuCutter cut zillions of squares and strips from our bugs and critters fabric. Boy, what a time saver that is! Several people sewed the strips to make rail fence blocks and pieced the center of this quilt. The layout had been my idea, but I didn't like it at all when it was made! Eek! So I added the green border to give the eye a place to rest and used most of the rest of the strips as an outer border. I just love piano keys!

Today I got back to work on a quilt I started some time ago. I love the blue strata, but it seems like water to me and it's not a water quilt. I'm going to have to to make a landscape quilt before long! It's so hard to cut these big strata up, but I now have all the strata made and most of the squares cut. The quilt will also have some wonky log cabins, which I just got started on today.

It feels great to be finishing up some old projects -- they were really weighing me down. If you're feeling that way about your UFO's, you might want to read this post on the Happiness Project blog. I subscribe to the blog and belong to their Facebook group because the posts do help keep me focused on positive things.

Sruti top done!

Done! Well, except for quilting and binding, but I'm doing very simple quilting because the top is so busy (and because I only know how to do simple quilting). It is loud and bright, but I think a toddler will like it. I hope so.

Remember how I said I always put lots of extra fabric on my letters so I can trim them all to size? Well ... sigh ... I had to redo the T because it was too short. I wish now that I had redone the whole letter to make it jauntier, but I didn't and that's that.

This is the first time I've done the piano keys on a paper foundation. I saw on Bonnie Hunter's Quiltville site (sorry, I forget exactly where) about sewing strings on a page from the phone book, so I gave it a try and really like it. It's hard to make those little angled pieces form a straight line. This was easy -- everything stayed straight, easy to trim, the paper stood up to ironing and the ink stayed on the paper (whew!), and when everything was done, the paper came right off the back.

Now, back to work on taxes ...

Sruti & D9P

Hoorah, I'm shooting down UFO's!

I started this for a friend's baby girl Sruti a long time ago. Today I finished the i (see how the dot is a little heart?) and put borders around all the letters. I've learned to put a LOT more border than I think I need, because otherwise I don't have enough. I'd rather whack off what I don't need than try to add more.

The border/binding fabric has all the right colors, but I'm not sure I like it. It will just be a narrow border (about an inch). If I don't use this, I'll probably do a 1" border with the same solids in 3" to 4" pieces. The closeup below shows it better.

I think as a narrow border, that dotted fabric works. It's hard to tell when I just lay the unstitched blocks on a big piece of the fabric. Thoughts? That's a wonky piano key border, which I am really into these days -- and it uses up all those whacked off pieces!

Last post I promised to show what happens to a Disappearing 9 Patch (D9P) when it disappears.

Cut the 9 patch in half both vertically and horizontally. Measure carefully -- you're going to have to stitch these back together.

Then flip 2 pieces that are diagonally opposite from each other and stitch back together for a whole new block! Since I have lots of different greens and an uneven number of ants and blue and red watermelon squares, I will switch out the quarter-blocks with other cut D9P blocks until I get a pleasing design -- I don't want all the same greens together. I like some unity in the quilt, so all my centers are the same (watermelon seeds) and all the borders are green -- though scrappy greens. But if you keep the border squares the same, and the focus squares the same, then you might want to vary the centers to keep the quilt from being just plain boring!

That's what I did with this one -- all the border squares were the same bear footprint fabric, and most of the focus squares were bears (but don't you love the s'mores fabric? I just had enough for a few squares). So I varied the center squares among several brights and then switched out the small blocks before sewing them back together.

See now? This is why we all took science. This is the Law of Conservation of Matter at work! The Disappearing 9 Patch didn't really disappear, it just got rearranged into something else.

Quilts!

Project Linus. I may have been neglecting my blogging, but I have not been neglecting my quilting. Tomorrow is Project Linus Make A Blanket Day and my car is loaded with 79 quilts/fleece blankets to deliver. And NO, I did NOT make them all myself!! My guild made some of them, and others were dropped off by various community groups.

But I did make lots of kits from my guild's donated fabrics. We had zillions of squares of all sizes, and we cut more. Here I tried to make a quilt for a child who loves pink.

I don't go for just grabbing any square and stitching it to the next, so I tried to lay out this quilt (limited by the squares I had available) to have lighter ones in the center. It's really fun to be forced to use only what's at hand.

And we're always looking for something simple but different so quilters of all skill levels can sew during our worknights, and I thought disappearing 9 patches might be fun. Right now we're making Project Linus quilts for Camp Coco (a camp for children with cancer and blood disorders). We had a few different watermelon fabrics and lots of greens among our donations, so I put together a Disappearing 9 Patch kit with watermelon fabrics as the main focus, the seeds as the constant center square (which gets cut into smaller squares) and a big variety of greens to form the rectangular "border" strips around the melons. And what is eating outdoors without a few ants?!?

If you know what a D9P is, you can imagine what this will look like when it's cut up and resewn. I'm actually working on this one myself at the Make A Blanket Day tomorrow, so I'll post a photo of what appears when a 9-patch disappears. We have several D9P's in transformation at the moment.

My stuff. I'm starting to treat my Project Linus work like a real "job," so that my other quilting time is just for me. Those projects will be in another post. After tomorrow I am putting away the Linus stuff for a few days!

Geometric abstract art. There was a wonderful slideshow of early 20th century geometric abstract art in the New York Times online this morning. The pieces are part of the Newark Museum's collection (not New York,  Newark!). I love this style, and I think many of them would make wonderful quilts. Take a look at the slideshow by clicking here, and check out the accompanying article here. I'd love to make a quilt modeled on the feel of this red and white one, which I pasted in here to encourage you to take a look at the others.

Winter. And finally, we have had snow, snow, and more snow. And even more snow is on the way Sunday and Monday -- another 5 to 7 inches! We weren't hit as hard as the mid-Atlantic, but I'm still sick of it.

This is what snow used to mean in our house 20 years ago! It's easier now, but not quite so much fun.

Here and gone!

This is the month of travels -- 3 trips between Thanksgiving and Christmas! I'm off tomorrow but realized today that I haven't posted since my return from New York. It was a totally cool trip. I got to meet Victoria of Bumble Beans, see both my daughters, and spend the holiday with my husband's family. I love New York, love it, love it. So exciting and inspirational!
I took waaaay too many photos to post, so I'll keep this one more or less quilty. I couldn't get a photo to show this well, but at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I saw these 3 little drinking vessels from the 2nd or 3rd century. They say,

"Avete!", "Misce!" and "Reple!"

-- meaning "Cheers!", "Mix another drink!" and "Fill it up!" How cute is that, especially decorated with all those dots? I think I'll put those words on a quilt, with grapes and wine bottles and such (and maybe a few dots). Too much fun! Makes all those years I studied Latin worthwhile. :)
And what's this? Looks like some primitive geometric design, laid out like a tablerunner. Think on it a second, and I'll show you the inspiration further down. Meanwhile, look at this:
Doesn't it look like a quilt? It's the ceiling of a Korean restaurant where we had dinner one night.
And that tablerunner design -- it's the sign (with reflection) from the Museum of Modern Art!
What a great museum! Wonderful stuff inside, but everything about its design is impressive. I loved the bridges and staircases:
And since I'm keeping this post quilty, there was a quilt on display at the MoMA!
Well, it wasn't displayed as a quilt, but the quilt is part of a piece called "Bed" by Robert Rauschenberg, and shows his own (they think) quilt, sheet and pillow, splashed with paint.

And finally, this is nice and geometric and could easily become a quilt design, but I was so annoyed to see a square pile of yellow bricks on display as art! I find it insulting.

I hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season!

Bumble Beans & me

In her studio in ny!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I was just pulling out our Thanksgiving leaves from years past because we read them aloud every year. When the kids were little, we'd each write something we were thankful for on a leaf to put on a tree, or sometimes we'd put feathers on a turkey. We wanted them to realize that they had a lot to be thankful for.
And what were they thankful for? Well, one leaf says:

"I'm thankful for scotch tape. It's sticky and it sticks to my fingers."

And there's a feather that says

"I'm thankful for no more world wars ... yet anyway."

They're a little more sophisticated now (!!), but they are still appreciative of things, and I am very thankful for them!
Ah, these nicely stacked boxes belie all the work -- and the huge mess!-- that went into filling them. I sorted and cut about 1 bazillion squares the last few days. They're from the Linus stash and we need to turn them into quilts.
Someone donated a pile of pre-cut solids that are just gorgeous, but there aren't enough for a quilt. So I pulled some other solids and sketched a layout. This one will be beautiful!
I got a little of my own stuff done, too -- cut my blue strata into squares (so hard to do -- I loved the big blue strata). They are much less impressive now, but they should look good again when reassembled with some other stuff. I hope so!
And what's this? At my guild's quilt show, I won a raffle! Twelve quilted placemats, one for each month of the year. Wow! They're just terrific, I love having them.

Some exciting news for the next few days -- tomorrow I get to meet another quilt blogger, and this week I see my grown-up kids!

A very
Happy Thanksgiving
to each and every one of you!

Stripping

Thanks for the helpful comments on yesterday's post! I'll check my stash of blacks and reds and get back to it.
In the meantime, I did some more strip sets for the "Statavarious" (love that name!) quilt I'm making for the family room. These will get cut into much smaller pieces and be interspersed with some contrasting fabrics, so the order here doesn't matter.
And I finally took this block I made ages ago off the design wall! I love it, so I quilted and bound it to make a hot pad worthy of my best culinary triumphs. I tried a 2" strip for binding and it worked pretty well, but the corners were more difficult. There's no room for error, so I think I might do 2-1/4" (maybe 2-1/8?) on a bigger quilt, but this skinny strip finished nice and tight and it's exactly the same width on both sides.

Think ahead

The living room floor is there when the design wall gets too small, but next time I'll think ahead before I lay out the blocks and try to avoid the table!
It was still dark when I came downstairs this morning so the quilt was essentially in grey scale -- like looking at a black and white photo. Sounds crazy that this would help when looking at a black and white quilt, but it did! (Maybe it was just being away for a few hours that had the effect.) So I've rearranged a few blocks since I took this photo last night, but you get the idea.

Here's the plan -- a narrow border in color, then a wider border in tone-on-tone black (the one used in those little black cornerstones), and then a big zag zag all around. I'm thinking ahead and welcome your suggestions before I start cutting and stitching. Here's a drawing of my layout so you'll know what I'm talking about.


1) Inner border. Should the inner border be one fabric? If so, I'll probably do some shade of red. I was thinking of doing lots of colors, but I'm not sure whether that will just look sloppy here. I think the eye may need a place to rest. There will be a black border next to it, but multiple colors may be too chaotic on what is already a pretty chaotic quilt.

2) Zig Zag background. I plan to do the zig zag in brights and the question is whether for the background I want to do mixed blacks and whites (like in the center of the quilt) or choose only fabrics that are more black than white. I'm leaning towards that now, and will be sure that the brights stand out against it. Thoughts?

And I loved my word of the day -- acnestis. It means "the part of the body where one cannot reach to scratch." Who knew there was such a word?