Oh, happy day! Lookie what’s happening here! A quilt along! AND THERE ARE STAR BLOCKS INVOLVED!

I’m so excited, I wanted to start yesterday, but I’m too busy getting ready for Maker Faire (yay!), and I still need to wait for the organic sheeting I plan to use as the background fabric to arrive from eQuilter. I ordered it Sunday, before the quilt along even officially started. Ditto for choosing some of my fabrics:

There are those who would say that the best part of making quilts from one’s scrap pile is using up all those scraps. And they are on to something.

But.

I am here to tell you that the best part of making quilts from MY scrap pile is working along, so completely absorbed in a project that I’m casting aside the leftover fabric without thinking about it. Measure, cut, sew repeat, until it’s time to clean off the dining room table, and voila: a pile of prints I never thought to mix, mixing themselves. I never would have come up with this otherwise.

I think I’m getting a hang of this craft thing….

I’m blogging from Angelfish & Co. today because I can. (I can has multitazk?) Guess what’s new in the shop today?

MY NEW LOG CABIN QUILT! TAKE THAT, MISTER LINCOLN!!!

Actually, I have no real reason to lord my piecing success over our 16th president. Unless it was my obsession with U.S. history that made me keep at this block for so long, and I cant be sure that it wasn’t.

Notice that Hatbox would not even tread upon the top. She was just that impressed!

I backed it with chenille, because I just want it to be hugged for its entire lifetime. Sorry to be so sappy. I got these pins from the amazing Rox via the pin cushion swap. It’s all made with love and stuff.

Seriously, did I mention that I made a log cabin quilt?

1. sampler blocks, 2. star of bethlehem, 3. log cabin, pink, 4. housedress

Two summers ago, I made some super cute, SUPER pastel quilt blocks in between participating in various swaps and things. I was really ramped up to make a queen-sized sampler, until I did some math, and realized I’d need like, 49 blocks to make that happen.

49 different blocks is not an insurmountable number. But it was enough to intimidate me for 20 months.

My block from yesterday wasn’t exactly what I wanted for the project I’d had in mind, but once I realized it fit in with my summer of ‘06 group, I though, “why not?”

If I make a block every month from now to 49, it’s going to take me like, 5 years to do the top. Oh, well. I guess I can live with that.

I do have a couple of old projects I can integrate into a few blocks, such as the housedress above. That’s left over from a small quilt I’ve been working on since college, and I really like the log cabin-style borders I added. Even though the block still fits with my super soft palette, it seems to be taking the quilt in a new direction. Its no longer so… safe? And it inspired a narrow log cabin border in a Star of Bethlehem block, which I need to rename. Because it features bras and panties.

I don’t know how excited I’ll stay about this one in the short term, but I’m optimistic enough to have made a new tag for the “sweet sampler quilt.”

Hello, A Roll. I think I am on you!

Hi.

Remember when I was done with log cabins?

I lied.

Well, I didn’t exactly lie. I was pretty sincerely fed up with the whole concept, and completely at peace with my decision. But I’ve just had one of those weekends in which I couldn’t wait to start a new quilting project. Only I didn’t know what kind of project, except that I wanted it to be Extremely Spectacular and Nothing Like Anybody Has Ever Done Before.

You can imagine the difficulty I had finding inspiration photos.

So I was reduced to looking, once again, at pictures of log cabin quilts, trying to understand their hypnotic influence on me, when I found this.

And I thought, “Well, I could try a spiral. That seems safe.”

And it was. Relatively.

The main design problem I’ve been having is that trying to develop a continuous-looking line doesn’t allow for any big jumps in value. I had to eschew a lot of great prints because they were too bright, and that’s never fun. Of course, had I simply used a white background, I probably could have gone completely nuts. Or not. There are no quiet little pastels in Rosa Pomar’s quilt, after all.

So my creation, once again, seems destined for cushion-ville, but that’s okay. I think if I tighten up the palette - not everything needs to be a scrap quilt, I guess - I can actually make this work for 16 blocks!

What do you do when the deadline for the Flirty Apron Swap is just around the corner, and you can’t seem to find any of your apron patterns, or even a suitable fabric for starting from scratch?

Well, YOU are probably too responsible to get yourself into such a situation, but I am organizationally challenged in more ways than one. So last night, I googled frantically for a cute apron idea, and found this. Today, I made the rounds of home stores downtown until I found a cute tea towel:

To make an aprony shape, I followed the guidelines of the Ben Franklin tutorial, but balked at hemming.

I don’t know why. It’s not hard. I guess I’m not having an “I like hemming” day. Thankfully, I pretty much never clean my workspace, so I had a big pile of pre-made bias tape getting in my way the entire time I was trimming the towel. Ta-da!

I decided to leave about a 30-inch section for the neck, because who wants to squeeze her head into an apron? I ironed the bias tape to get any kinks out, and folded it in half, marking the center of the tape with a pin.

Then, I pinned the tape 15 inches on either side of the center. It’s easy to do with a cutting mat:

The pins indicated where to start pinning the tape around the raw edges of the towel. A bit of masking tape was invaluable at this stage:

And then I sewed away! Only very slowly, because bias tape can be a real mess when I go too quickly! I reinforced the edges where the bias forms the ties, because there will be quite a bit of stress on that area. Sorry for the blurry pic; all it shows is a straight stitch worked about four times back and forth:

I may have a hard time giving this one up. Good thing I was underconfident in my ability not to screw this up, and bought an extra towel!

So what you’re saying is that by harmonizing all these different elements,
you’re creating kind of continuity in the piece?

– How to Make an American Quilt

Who remembers my recent log cabin post?

In which I made a log cabin block, and, in a fit of ambition, joined a log cabin challenge and swore I’d have a log cabin quilt, made up only of scraps, at the end of the year?

Well, I tried. I really did. I made the February block. And I didn’t like it.

So I made another February block. Once again, I did not like it.

I don’t know if I’m just short on the number of scraps required to make a log cabin block actually look like something other than a hot mess, or if I just don’t have an eye for the log cabin. But, I am, as they say, so over it.

Hambone asked me what I thought I was doing wrong. I told him that everything would look fine during assembly, but once I had two or three blocks, the whole thing would look messy and disjointed.

“I think all log cabin quilts look that way,” said Hambone.

“You do? Well then, to hell with log cabins!”

I value Hambone’s opinion in that, when I ask his advice on a quilt, he tends to point out something I haven’t thought of, and that leads me to make good decisions. Never mind that I usually do the opposite of what he suggests - it’s the discussion that matters, right?

So he was pretty shocked that I swore off log cabins then and there.

“You’re going to stop making a quilt because I don’t like log cabins?”

“No,” I said. “I’m going to stop because I don’t like the quilt. I’m not going to start again because there’s no point in making a quilt you’re not going to like. I can just make something else.”

By the way, I quite like what Jenna is working on at the moment. But I wouldn’t choose to make that myself, which is a pretty good indication of why the log cabin-along was a bad idea from the start. Every now and again, we quilters have to admit to ourselves that there is not time in a lifespan to make everything we might want to. It’s not a fun realization, but it is part of what makes a handmade item beautiful and special.

The original, cute block, by the way, was easy enough to make into a pillow, and is now on sale at Angelfish & Co. I may be a quitter, but I’m a resourceful quitter!

Why is Hatbox looking all, “OMGWTFBBQ?”

Could it be that The Total Love Quilt - yes, I started it so long ago, that the reference to Parappa the Rapper was still vaguely current - could have a cousin?

A CANINE cousin???

It’s FDR’s dog, you guys!!!

I may swoon. I may swoon until these are no longer on backorder!

I promise!

I spent days four and five (today) out of my Crafty 365 cutting apron pieces. So unglamorous! But really, I have to have five together by Saturday, and if I don’t do them assembly-line style, they’ll take over my life!

Since another pile of fabric next to my rotary cutter is the last thing you want to look at, here’s the apron I’m submitting for Tie One On! The theme was polka dots, which was easy for me, because I’ve been going through a big dot phase for about two years now. There are dots on BOTH these fabrics:

I know, I know. I have gone dot crazy! I actually like this for Valentine’s Day: no enormous, obnoxious hearts, just plenty of sweet stuff and a touch of pink. Yay!

It’s come to my attention that I cannot de-clutter my home for more than ten minutes without running into some unfinished project or other. C’est la vie. I welcome the call to productivity.

Today, for example, I found a big stack of blocks - 25 in all - that I put together in ‘05 or ‘06. (Why can’t I remember these things? And why didn’t I blog them at the time?) I wanted to make a string quilt, but not a super stringy string quilt, if that makes sense. And so I pieced the strings in small blocks, stopping and trimming to 8 1/2 inches, 8 1/2 being, for me, the ultimate creative number.

(The width is something I can’t remember off the top of my head, ad I suppose I could measure it, but it hardly seems to matter. I chose it because it made good use of my scraps, and I have a special love for big portrait rectangle blocks.)

I found the blocks, little orphaned things that they were, and was instantly glad to have joined the Crafting 365 pool on flickr. (Am I turning into a Joining Things Psycho?) Normally, I would have tossed them back, or found some other place where they could lie around, forgotten. But when I realized I’d done no crafting today, I thought, okay, it’s time to put these to some use.

I’ve always had the notion of bordering them all in some nice bold fabric, maybe a deep red, and then adding big wide borders in a variety of prints to make a nice big nap blanket, but I could never seem to find the right deep red fabric. But today, because I was in full-blown Craft-Every-Day, Use-What-You-Have, I’m-Addicted-to-Joining-Stuff mode, I decided to march over to my fabric rack, grab some random fabric I had not yet found a use for, and use it as a border, aesthetics be damned.

And wouldn’t you know, I found a half-yard of this nice, deep, red, that I don’t remember buying, or why I would have wanted it in the first place.

And so I’ve been bordering. Go, me!