check out A Quilt A Day.

I can’t help it. I just love hexagons!

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

In addition to the super rad vintage hex quilt I picked up while thrifting a while ago, I also found a bag of 106 canvassy white squares for $3. (This is a huge deal in my neck of the woods. Thrift stores around here aren’t always very thrifty.) So I’m using them to back my little hexy flowers.

I really had no intention of making a hexagon quilt. Ever. In my life. But I guess Goodwill decided it was meant to be?

Actually, it’s my lap. The impossible has happened.

After mentally accepting the notion that I might be able to talk myself into making some hexagons, and after going so far as turning to my husband at the county fair and asking, “Do you like these? Do you think you might want to learn to make them?” like the shamelessly lazy cow that I am, I found a vintage 36″ x 42″ hexagon quilt at Goodwill today.

Pardon me, I’m still in awe.

I’m clearly having a problem with the concept of the one a day quilt-along.

I stopped round one at 36 blocks. I need… quite a few more. Which means I had no business starting round two, and yet, here I am, having, at this point, finished the equivalent of a two a day quilt along.

Heh.

In a moment of weakness, I purchased a couple of charm packs and a fat quarter collection from Superbuzzy at the Renegade Craft Faire in SF, and, in many more moments of weakness, made a bunch of 9-patches. 56 in all.

This was an insanely easy project. Each charm square gets divided into fourths. A 2.5-inch strip cut from the longest side of a fat quarter will make centers for eight 9-patches. Cut 4 strips of the same size to make the four corners of each block. Mix up your color scheme and repeat six times. Lay out on your wrinkly bed sheets to make sure white is the right choice for sashing. Proceed accordingly.

I have a serious sashing backlog building up over here. I have four sets of blocks that need sashing, and no plan to deal with any of them. Somebody, please, convince me I have the strength of mind to deal with those long strips.

This isn’t specifically a Sweet Valley High craft project. But. If you ever subjected yourself to the historical-fiction weirdness that were the Sweet Valley Sagas, you may remember this book, which was ostensibly the history of the Wakefields, but was really a re-imagining of 100 years or so of American history in which Liz and Jess meddle and manipulate their way through the ages:

(Oh, that cover art. Francine Pascal, why must you always prey upon my love for pastels?)

And if you have the weird head fro details that I somehow have when it comes to bad young adult fiction, you may remember that when 1800’s Elizabeth (Elisabeth?) becomes a hobo because Jess has, naturally, run off to become the hottest bareback rider in any circus in the history of the world, Liz/Lis wraps all of her stuff up in an evening star quilt.

Leave it to the Sweet Valley franchise to make it a really sexy sounding quilt, and not something normal like Log Cabin, or Drunkard’s Path. But then, it would be very un-Elizabeth to sleep under a Drunkard’s Path quilt, unless she’s on her way to the Jungle Prom.

An image search for evening star quilt brings up a number of different things, but most look like this:

Now, this was made around 1929, so it post-dates Liz’s prairie adventures, but isn’t it uncanny that it matches her “sparkling, aquamarine eyes”?

I have too much going on, sewing-wise, to start a new quilt right now, but if one of these is on my bed in six months, we’ll have all learned just how obsessive I can get.

Glamorous, I know. Dig the zip-locking component on those plastic baggies. Aww, yeah!

During my last couple of weeks on my long journey to 256 log cabin squares (and what, I ask you, was I thinking?), I decided it was time to become an excessive counter. Once the blocks had grown into a number I could legitimately refer to as “a lot” I kept going on vacation (I know, poor Jennicakes) and forgetting how many I had made.

So I devised a simple system of counting out a stack of ten and ensconcing it safely in one of the many ziplocks I keep around for mailing orders and trades to damp climates. I know those posh fold-over bags with the glue strip are more to the fashion, but I always hope the unsightly but utilitarian zip lock will at least inspire re-use.

Anytothewho, a bunch of bags of groups of tens (who invited Dr. Suess?) would mean that, to see how many blocks I’d made, I could simply count the bags and multiply by ten, thereby saving myself many hours. Little did I know that once I had bagged all of the blocks, I’d notice that I’d made 143 blocks. Which is one shy of 144, or, as we quilters say, 12 by 12.

Hmm, I thought. Do I really need a 16 by 16 block quilt? Sure it would look really freaking impressive, but had I even conceptualized how large a quilt with 16 5″ blocks, plus sashing, would be? I did some quick math in my head and concluded that it would make one BIG ASS quilt. Like, bigger than necessary. Unwieldy for finishing, which I could deal with, and possibly for sleeping under which… no. Just no.

I re-counted the blocks in their bags to make sure no stack was short - I mean, imagine the horror of beginning to sash all of these, only to find I was a few short? Turns out, one stack was… long? As in, not short. As in, there were eleven in the bag. As in, if I decided to make a 12 by 12 grid, I was finished making log cabins.

I’d love to report on the happy dance that ensued, but, frankly, it didn’t. The whole thing was an anticlimax and I really stressed over whether or not I should make more. See, starting my job really cut into my log cabin time, so I wasn’t able to get it finished - let alone sashed - in time for my goal, which was to enter it into the county fair. So after a few weeks of abject self-loathing, followed by a deep resolve to finish it by my 30th birthday/the end of the year, to find that those final 112 blocks would just be superfluous actually made me feel kind of sad.

I strongly considered going ahead with them, but, as I mentioned before, that’s a hell of a lot of work to put into a quilt that’s so long you have to tunnel under it for five minutes just to sneak out of bed for a 2 a.m. pee.

So, that’s that. No carefully choreographed, sun-drenched photo-shoot to show them off; just a bunch of squares in a Danskos box. Honestly, I’m just so bewildered that I made it this far. Even though I want this finished quilt more than I have ever wanted any material possession, ever, I still can’t quite believe I made enough of these, without even realizing it.

My June and July have been more than insane, in a good way - all part of my plan to have the best summer ever.

So I can’t work up a lot of guilt over not posting here much.

On the other hand, falling behind on my virtual quilting bee output does have me hanging my head in shame. Especially when, after thinking I had sent Cris’ blocks weeks and weeks ago, I just found them while cleaning the guestroom. What???

So while we’re on the subject, I might as well show you them.

I think a lot of folks doing the bee thing choose one or two dominant fabrics and then a bunch of accents, so Cris’ fabrics were a fun challenge, since they were pretty similar in value. I chose a chevron pattern because I wanted to show off big chunks of fabric in roughly equal amounts, but with a sense of movement. And made from a bunch of 3 7/8″ half-square triangles, it was no trouble at all to get this one together. Please, please, please, even if you are a beginning quilter and hoping to remain so, learn to make half-square triangles. They’re as easy as squares to cut and piece once you’ve practiced a bit, and they’ll expand your piecing repertoire many times over.

And this is a concept I fell in love with a few years ago when I saw a quilted bag in a Japense craft book made up of similar patches. The randomness makes for incredible ease of piecing, but the side borders really clean things up, visually. Also, I think with all the squares we’re used to seeing in patchwork, a bunch of rectangles becomes incredibly pleasing to the eye.

There. Blogged. Now, to get these, and others in the mail….

I love binding things so much, I sometimes toy with the idea of starting a binding service. Does that even make sense?

Everyone always talks about starting the day or week right, and I don’t get it. I’m lazy and crabby in the a.m., and I don’t even feel guilty about that! As long as it doesn’t leach into the rest of my day, of course.

Yesterday afternoon, I got Threads Together fabric from Debbie, and I literally gasped when I opened the package. I’m not a Kaffe Fassett n00b or anything, but it still sometimes takes my breath away when I see how incredible his fabrics are in person.

What’s a girl to do, but dive right in?

I started with a variation on the “Road to Oklahoma” block. It’s a variation because I didn’t have enough of the fan print for the little triangles, so I swapped in the orange that you see. I got the orange in a scrap pack a few years ago, but I think, coincidentally, it’s also Kaffe. I added a border because RTO is only an 8″ block, with purple posts because I thought the eye could use a tiny break. The purple is just four fourths of a charm square, Kona cotton, no idea what color. Debbie sent everything else - can you see why I was cutting into these within 30 minutes?

Also, Debbie lives in Oklahoma, which is why is was easy to choose the first block. These prints just struck me as so bright and wild, that I wanted to ensure a good sense of proportion and make traditional blocks. When I make traditional blocks, I tend to choose them for the names. Which is stupid, in some ways, but, with so many to choose from, a method really is helpful.

For the second block, I knew I wanted a GIANT EXPLOSION OF COLOR, so I went with a star. Specifically, I knew I wanted a star with a large center block to show off this amazing floral, so I went with Aunt Addie’s Album, which is one of the blocks from the star quilt-along:

I really like making this block. It comes together really easily, for all the triangles, and it’s so pretty for showing off a fabric you really love. I made it once before, but, for some reason, forgot to take a photo. Thankfully, that can be rectified with a crappy webcam pic!

So, yeah. Debbie’s quilt. It’s going to be amazing! I have only seen two blocks so far (a bunch of people probably don’t even have their fabric yet!) and I am already super jealous. “Kaffe” and “Fassett” are apparently the words I need to remember if I ever join another bee, or we do another round of TT next year.

Remember my fabric cutting debacle? And how it quickly morphed into an effort to put 25 blocks in my Threads Together quilt, instead of just 16?

Well, who better to come to my aid than quilting genius amanda jean?

Check out what she sent:

I just keep studying these over and over, because I think they’re an excellent lesson on getting good mileage (or is it footage? inchage?) out of fabric. Square inch for square inch, these blocks don’t really contain all that much of the fabric I sent.

And yet, the fabrics she added don’t take away anything from the overall character of the quilt I “designed.” (Scare quotes because, when you don’t make any of the blocks yourself, it seems like cheating to call yourself a designer. But then, the concept had to come from somewhere.) I love the fabrics she added, and the fact that none of them overshadows the ones I sent.

Best of all is perhaps that her clever framing of all the little doggies have finally given me a name for this quilt: Chien et Chaise! Which is, of course, French for “dog and chairs.”

It sounds better in French.