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?

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.

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.

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.

Another view of all the blocks:

These do require a foundation for piecing, so I’ve been experimenting a bit with that. Water soluble interfacing was kind of cool, but a little pricey and can be tricky to work with. Some of it is nice and stiff, which is great for tracing and ironing, but I’m worried about the bulk it adds. I found some that was whisper-thin, but it sort of dissolved on contact with a hot iron, and shifted and wrinkled while I was tracing the pattern onto it. So I wasn’t too sorry to run out of that!

I tried freezer paper, which is super cheap, but more opaque than useful, and baking parchment, which is nice and transparent, but on a skinny roll that means a lot of waste for a 5.5″ block.

At the moment, I’m using tracing paper from a tablet, which is my favorite option so far. $2.40 buys enough paper to make 80 blocks, it doesn’t wrinkle, I can see through it to sew, and it tears away much more easily than any of the other paper I tried.

One downside of tracing paper is that I’d hoped to run it through my printer, thereby avoiding tracing out every. single. block. But it just isn’t of a weight that my printer can handle. Blerg. And, easy or not to tear, the whole tearing process takes longer than I would like.

But then, I’m trying to make 254 tiny log cabins. I don’t have much room to talk.

Just a quick update on this quilt. 54 down, 200 to go! I am feeling RIDICULOUSLY triumphant, given the scope of the project in front of me!

Yesterday, I spent something like 11 hours making 14 quilt blocks. Which makes… not quote a full row of my scrappy cabin quilt.

Today, my feet hurt from all the trundling between the machine and the cutting board, and I’m torn between

1. thinking it’s stupid to want to make a Queen-sized quilt out of 5″ log cabins and

2. feeling psyched that, after many gazillions of hours, I will get to sleep under a quilt so special that one-sixteenth of it couldn’t even be sewn on a full work day.

The cabins so far (32 in number):

Just 224 to go!

I wish I remembered to blog. Like, ever.

It’s not like I don’t have anything to talk about.

There’s this, for example.

Made from scraps I got in a scrap swap with the lovely Alison. If you’ve been to her shop, you can imagine the bag of loveliness I had to work with. I was able to piece this in a couple of afternoons, based on the premise that, if I was trading fabric for fabric, I ought to try to avoid expanding my stash too much.

I like how homey it looks. I think I’ll tie it.

And another totally unexpected project:

I picked up all of these 14″ x 4″ strips while bidding a fond farewell to WhizBang Fabrics in the Mission. I snapped up a bunch from the Katie Jump Rope line, because it’s popular and discontinued, but I didn’t have a plan for it until I sat down with a calculator and was able to puzzle out the possibilities.

I added a 14″-wide border to make it twin-sized. I’m trying to make more bed quilts, if just on principle - I sure as heck don’t have a twin bed anywhere. But who knew a twin top would fit our dining table just about perfectly? Oh, the possibilities….

Now that I have sent a massive amount of stuff to Craftland (seriously, the shopping costs make me want to faint!) I can work on things that are not aprons, masks, or flag bunting.

For like, a day or two. The Christmas rush has started, and it might be a good idea to clean house this month. Yes, I said “this month.” I live in squalor. But then, I’m an artist, so it’s a respectable squalor.

I have a long list of handmade gifts to make, and whether or not they’ll get done is anybody’s guess. I made a valiant effort yesterday, and I don’t know if I’m being too picky or what, but I might have just gotten myself nowhere at all.

Exhibit A:

Log Cabin blocks I meant to turn into a very chic pillow. Very agreeable to my aesthetic, which means they’re too cutesy for intended recipient.

Unfortunately, if you’ve never made one of these petite little blocks, you don’t know how easily a small project can morph into an addiction:

I love putting something cute in the center - fruit, flowers, animals - and making a little “story” out of the surrounding strips.

But my favorite middle squares have people in them. They really give so much life to the overall look. A good thing to remember when assembling the six or seven hundred of these it will probably require to make a bed-sized quilt. Can I get an OMGLOLZ!!!1! up in here?

And then, there’s the wedding quilt I need to make within the next month. Boy, howdy, I am freaking out about this! I started on something Denyse Schmidt-y that I quite like, but will the couple?

I don’t mean to be a hater, but those colors are not for everyone. I may need to scrap this idea, turn the block into a pillow for the intended recipient of the too-cute log cabin pillow, and start over with something more traditional.

OR, maybe I should just plow ahead on the wedding quilt, secure in the knowledge that my nice friends would actually never tell me if they disliked a handmade gift, and start the original pillow again, with different fabrics.

OR, maybe I should clean the bathroom, and deal with all of the above when my life has reached some measure of order.

Seriously guys, what would Martha do???

When I cut apron ties at a 90-degree angle - and who doesn’t??? - I always save the remaining triangle. I don’t particularly enjoy cutting triangles, so I’ve been stuffing the scraps into a baggie for about two years now.

I finally decided it made sense to line them up on some big muslin scraps (left over from quilt backing) to see if I can sort of turn them into squares.

Will it work?

I mean, this is about the last thing any of my quilting teachers would have encouraged. But with this many scraps, of a relatively small size, I just can’t be bothered with too much fiddlyness.

I’ll keep you posted.