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!