Building With What We Have

As you know I am actually rather enamored of the idea of the Quilts of Valor Foundation.  This is partially because I have been feeling the need to do more "good works" and quilting is a way to do that and still be doing what I want!  (Perfection is still a long way off, I know...)  I also feel more of a connection to the soldiers in question and have thought a great deal about the healing that all of the deployed soldiers need, not just the physically wounded ones.  N. has many patients who need all the support they can get as they struggle to put their lives back together.

So this is my first design and it is almost ready for presentation! 

The design is a Split Log Cabin, that is, a Long Cabin Block that is cut in half and joined to a different block.  In order to do this and have them be square the center is actually a rectangle....the square plus seam allowances through the center.  I saw a quilt done like this online and really liked the look of it.....especially since I had a jelly roll to do it with.

The quilt is actually a bit more than one jelly roll in size....the lighter colors come from a different roll.  It was so easy to put the blocks together with the pre-cut strips. 

The hardest part to put together was the border on the side of course, but I really wanted to give it a sense of being a work table....and that the process of rebuilding is ongoing.  It has all sorts of crazy bias and making things look "random" is actually very tricky.

N. recommended alternating the direction of the blocks, and I really like the way that turned out.  I even tried to set each split square with one going each way.  Of course, many of the squares aren't actually split....they were made as a half as I got down to smaller and smaller pieces that would go together.  The outer row is actually just slightly longer than the 42 inch strip on a full split block.  If you look close, some of them have slightly different colors on the outside of one corner.  Others have matching centers but not matching outsides.  It all worked out though.

The back is also black and has little stars on it.

After a day of trying to figure out why the picture of the quilting (by the lovely Debbie Younkin of Fort Collins near mom's house) I have given up.  Some day I may have the presence of mind to figure out why everything else works but that pic won't.....sigh!  You are just going to have to trust me that it looks GREAT!  It is a whirlpool style all-over design and it works really well.

And so we don't get too bogged down in things I OUGHT to be doing, here is the last pic of the "Presentation Case" which is simply a coordinating Pillowcase.

All in all, this has been a great experience that I plan to continue.

Now I need to go bind "Not a Wallflower" and if I am really ambitious I will post pics of the pillowcases I made for the 1,000,000 Pillowcase challenge (and you can find info about that HERE!)

In the meantime, make something that makes you smile even if it is a mess (or some order, if that is more your style.....mine is mess in case you were wondering. heh) k.

Mastery

It is an interesting thing to watch children pursue mastery...but I should say that it is also fun to watch (or be) an adult in the pursuit of it as well.

For my birthday I bought myself some quilt books...all filled with spiky things. Quilt Mavens and Mariner's Compass.

So this is what I have been playing at the last day or so. The fabrics are from my friend's "Quilts of Valor" challenge for Cursed Quilt (which really is cursed by the way....I was supposed to go fabric shopping with a member and my son announced that he was going to be sick. Hasn't yet, but I am not going ANYWHERE in the car. ;)

 In order to use this book you have to either know how to do foundation piecing (paper piecing) or be a bold adventurer.  Either way she has some great designs in here and...even better...some good instructions on how to make your own!  You can see my sketch here with the book.  Not super complex or even as spiky as I am inclined to be, but it is my first effort.

As this was for the challenge I actually drafted this twice.... the foundation in the picture is only 8 1/2 inches.  Since the blocks are supposed to be 12 1/2 I realized that I had better just draw it again and not be lazy. hehehe

The trickiest part of this whole process is figuring out how to divide the design and decide which section has to be done first.  I could see there were several ways to do it, but everyone was going to require one of my shapes to be split.  Here you can see it as it is so far...

I like the look of the circle in the center of compass designs but I am not so sure I really want to do any applique' hehehe.  (I also am not sure I know what color it should be when I do it...) The fabrics for the Challenge are the two dark prints.

As for my Mavens Book...this block makes me feel cool.  Yes I know I am a terrible quilt geek...and that it may not go with all the rest of my blocks that I designed for the challenge quilt.  But I LIKE it.  (Note: this is a pattern from the CD that comes with the book....and it was 9 inches, thus the borders...but I even like those.  The inner fading border is from a  fabric I got for my "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" which is still just a top in my work box.
Yeah, I know.  Quilt Geek.  You can't have any idea how I agonized over getting the lines of little dots in the middle of that spike.  Surprisingly hard.  But worth it I think. heh.

This style of block is sometimes called a "New York City Beauty" and other variations on the theme.  That appears to mean that it is a spiky 1/4 circular pattern.  That is actually how I found the books I bought....searching for that type of Art Deco block with the arcs in it.  The books I ended up with are better than any of the ones purporting to be about actual "New York City Beauty" blocks.

Do something that makes you happy today.  It doesn't even have to be spiky! k.

Always a Quandry...

Ooops, in the throes of my Anti-picture post I forgot to do my office pic.  Maybe I had better just give that up as an affectation.  What do you think?

This is what I have to present for today....and my quandry.  (Sometime I will get back up to speed with all the other adventures I am having, but it is good to start small. :)

This is a little piece I put together with one of my Brand-Spanking New Accuquilt GO!  (I think the exclamation mark is part of the trademark. heheh)  It is a pretty snappy little thing and works well for what it is.  What is that you may ask?  Well it is a die cut system designed for fabric.  Accuquilt Website  You buy a cutter (called a die) for each specific shape you need.  I have the small version (GO!  Be sure to note the exclamation mark.) which will precision cut up to 6 layers at a time.  (The Studio version is a little heavier duty at 10 layers.)

Now those of you who know me well may be perplexed.  This is a great product for people who like to do the same thing over and over again....which as you know I do not. 

I still think that it will be a useful product in my office, but I am going to have to work at it a bit.

Cutting the Apple Cores was actually fun....fun for Senneth.  As the dies are foam with the blades buried inside they are safe to handle; so I prepared the fabric pieces and had S. crank the handle that forces the die between the rollers.  She reported that it was great fun and was disappointed when I announced that we were done for now.  What you see above are some of the pieces we cut.  The curved edges have the notches in the die so the centers of those curves are already marked.  I still had to snip the concave edges when putting them together but the results were fairly easy to achieve.  I didn't take a close up but the corners set in beautifully.

My difficulty is this:  Now that I have this cute little piece, do I wrap it up quick as a wall hanging and put it in the box going to Humanitarian Services (I even have left over red bias tape to bind it with!) or do I find some blue and do the whole primary color thing in an actual quilt.  I have more yellow but not more red....well except for the bias tape.  (Wow that yellow is hard to read.  I see why good web designers don't do colors very often. hehehe)

What do you think?  In the meantime I think I will go back to working on the Circles piece.....

Go Check out the Cursed Quilt Blog.  I posted the pics of the Wall Hangings we have ready to go.  Be sure to comment on the ones you like best.  There are a few more that didn't quite get finished, so there may be more pics later. :)  Have a happy day. k.

" Trains"

Once I got the Cursed Quilt Group going, I actually made a quilt top for s. first. It will make an appearance here in the next few entries probably, but not yet.

After the top was completed i. started lobbying for his own quilt, not understanding exactly what that means I suspect. So with the boy in mind, I headed off to the fabric market to fined "IT." I was greatly entertained to find a great train fabric for my central theme. The fabric spread also includes a checkerboard pattern, some double-decker buses, bright red and some lively yellow. After the fact I added a textured gray and some blue. I wanted to add some green but I didn't have any and was too anxious to get started.....of course.

So here it is.  I had originally planned for there to be a strip of the yellow right down the center....then I thought of the red diamonds....and then in the shower one morning I realized that I could make and I for i.....and if you turn it on its side it is an H for good measure. :)  How could I not do it after that.....well, it was almost ill-fated.  You can not see it from the pictures but one end of the I is made up of MANY pieces.  This is because I used every last inch of that yellow piece I bought; literally, I trimmed off the selvedge edge and everything else is as you see it.  (I even unpicked some yellow from the ends where I squared things up!)  That also explains why there isn't any yellow in the back, eh?

When the quilt is put together I  plan to have bias tape "rails" that run over the railroad ties border.  They are apparently not required for i. though as he chugged around the edge every time he found it laying out on the floor for contemplation.  The math involved in this design from my head was staggering.  Calculating proportions so that the border would fit evenly on the center panel....and then having to recalculate it again when I decided to put the strip down the center....and then a third time when it became an I.  Calculating the size of the triangles was actually made easier by a formula I found on http://www.quiltbug.com in their "learn" section.  They have excellent resources on the site for resolving a good many quilting complications.

The fan shaped corners are curved thanks to my Mom who cuts right to the heart of things.  I was complaining that I wasn't sure how you go about attaching the corner piece to a Pieced Grandmother's Fan (I think they are usually applique'd in place.)  She just laughed and asked why I didn't just leave them rounded.  Brilliant...and a LOT less work.  It was still not  easy though....I even have some secrets about those corners that I am not going to confess to.

 

The idea for the back, since I decided I needed to commit to machine quilting something more than just little sample squares, was to crazy quilt with the train pieces that were left.  (It is hard enough to hand quilt through one layer of "pieced" much less two! - in case you didn't follow my logic there. hah.)  I added the panels of "things that go" which turned out to be a somewhat mixed decision.  I like the way they look but the fabric is not the same quality as the others and stretched almost as much cross-grain as the others did on the bias....which I now have a LOT of experience with.  Argh!  When I smooth the back out on the floor it lumps and bumps its way along.  I tried to get a pic of this effect but it didn't show.  I think it took me longer to piece the back than it did to piece the front, although the sheer amount of math I had to do on the front may balance that a bit.

All in all, I really like it so far.  I am not sure how the quilting will go, or how it will look when I am finished with it (since there isn't any "stitch in the ditch" when both sides are pieced) but it ill be exciting.  This is also my first labeled quilt.  The some of the embroidery is hard to see in the pics, but it says "Trains" "2010" and both our names.  (My great grand kids won't have to look on the internet when they have school projects, darn it!  Sorry Great Grandma Isabel....) k.