Flimsies and fun

How do you recover from knee surgery? Well, the first few days, you keep your knee elevated -- but then you keep your spirits up by quilting!

I can't do anything where I have to crawl around on the floor, or stand up too long while cutting, so I'm finishing up some UFOs. Today I pulled out the strip twist quilt I started a couple years ago. I needed more strips, couldn't find fabrics I was happy with, and put it away. Today I laid it out, thinking I might just use what I have to make a small throw, but then I played around a bit with the layout. The traditional layout is below, but what I'm thinking of now is on top -- setting the blocks differently and putting white sashing between them. I'm a little concerned about some of the dotted whites in the outer edges of the blocks, but I think I like it. Thoughts?

I needed to work on that bright, sunny quilt today because I spent yesterday piecing together blocks I won in a block lotto about 5 years ago. Yuck!! I hate how dull they are, how boring. Not my style at all. The colors are not quite as bad as they appear in this photo, but I didn't enjoy working on it. But it feels good to be DONE! Someone will like it -- I'm donating it and asking that it be quilted with bright thread and butterfly designs (most of the bigger squares have flowers).

I also made some blocks for the Block Lotto that Julie at Floribunda told me about.  They do some wonderful blocks -- February was wonky string hearts. Fun! And more fun when I took the huge bandage off my knee. What's that beneath the wrapping? BATTING?!?! Sure looked like it!

And how cool is this?

It's from a wonderful site called Dornob that has design ideas. It's not a quilting site, but has lots of inspiring stuff. The photo above is from their page where they show vintage furniture rehabed with patchwork -- take a look by clicking HERE.

If you can't make it to a quilt show ...

...the next best thing might just be a computer museum!

This is not a quilt, it's part of an old-fashioned computer. (And isn't it odd to think of computers as being old fashioned?) Many of the computer parts on display were simply beautiful to look at.

And this is not skeins of thread -- it's bundles of wires!

This jacquard was not actually on display, there was just a photo of the textile, but it shows how the history of fabric and the history of computing are interwoven (if you'll pardon the pun). The sign on the poster reads, "A complex pattern woven by the loom needed tens of thousands of individually punched cards. But once made and debugged -- like a software program -- the cards could be used many times to create identical fabric."
 
I went to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, ten days ago when I was visiting my daughter. It's a fascinating tour through our computer past, with well written (and often funny) descriptions, and staff who wander through the rooms giving little presentations and answering questions.

And check out the interior doors -- their design could definitely could be translated to a quilt!

Colorful Coins

I love scrappy, I love color, and I love using up odds and ends.

At one of our Project Linus worknights a few of us dug through our string bins and started sewing coin stacks by color. We got a few stacks done but then the project just sat waiting for almost a year.

Today I pulled out the stacks and finished them up, then reined in the colors with a dotted white.

It's so easy for coin stacks to get crooked and w-O-b-b-L-y, so I like to sew small chunks, trim to size, and then add the trimmed stacks to each other. My gridded ironing board is one of my favorite sewing tools--it's so easy to see what's straight and what's not! Wonky is wonderful as a design element, but not so great as a construction flaw.

This is just the top, not yet quilted. I think I'll use a rainbow of strings in the binding to give a little line of color around the edge. I like this layout color-wise -- in many rainbow patterns the colors are offset by one in each row, which gives you a color diagonal. I offset these by two, which breaks up the color lines and keeps your eye moving around the quilt more.

Project Linus gets this quilt, and I hope it makes a child happy. It made me happy to make it! And I like it so much, I may make a version for myself.

James's quilt is ready to be quilted

IMade some wonky stars with the fabrics used in James's name. In the star above, every "square" in the 9-patch is a different size -- whew, that takes awhile!

Made some more wonky stars.

And then pieced the back!

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.