July UFO is finished

This quilt was not the one drawn for July, but I made the switch because I knew I was going to be at my mom's house until mid-August, and there is no sewing machine there. This was the only remaining UFO on my list that just needed hand quilting. I partially quilted this quilt and put the binding on it so it could be in a quilt show in March 2002.
       Most of the hand quilting on this quilt is "in the ditch," one of my favorite hand quilting techniques. I love the way the fabric speaks for itself, the way the quilt flattens out and the way the lines straighten up when I stitch along the seam lines.
       The left side panel consists of four large blocks. From top to bottom, they are some kind of basket, a Penrose tiling, a state capital block called "Sitka" (the old capital of Alaska), and an eccentric star.
       The right side panel consists of four blocks. From top to bottom, they are a reversed squares block using a quick method I invented, a hidden wells block, a larger Penrose tiling, and a broken dishes block.
       The top and bottom rows of the center panel are double pinwheels. Cathy chose the fabrics for these. Along the left side of the center are six smaller blocks. Four are extra blocks from baby quilts I made for my kids, and the lower two are blocks made from leftover scraps of other quilts.
       The large block at the top center was a color study I made when I was taking classes from the late Kathleen Weinheimer. The center block is another state capital block, though I don't remember which state. The bottom center consists of four blocks - a nine-patch designed by Cathy, the one that says "Cathy," and two Cambodian applique blocks that I bought at a quilt show.
       Along the right side of the center panel is a Christmas mouse that I bought at Keepsake Quilting at my first visit there in the early 1990s. I made a Christmas wall hanging for my aunt, who loved mice, from the other mice in that pattern. The other blocks are another nine-patch designed by Cathy, some batik butterflies, another Cambodian block, and a sunshine and shadow block also designed by Cathy.

Quilty knitting

I finished a baby blanket for Project Linus last week at family camp. They wanted more blankets that were suitable for boys, and I thought the magenta and earth tone variegated yarn that they had donated to our knitting group might work. The pattern I chose needed more yarn than there was of the variegated yarn, so I used a compatible solid for the center of the blanket.

This is a close-up of the test patch for the next blanket, which will use up odds and ends of yarn. It's a seed stitch with each square 15 stitches x 24 rows, which comes out more or less square.

Cindy's Tote

I have to admit I cling to stuff - but thankfully, my kids don't. Cindy cleaned out her tote bag today and found an old pop tart at the bottom of it, among other things. In this picture you can see the brightly colored straw has worn off as well. So I found her a new tote and asked her with feigned casualness whether she wanted to throw it out. "Sure," she said. Well I have been all over the world with Cindy and her tote bag, and I had to take a picture of it before wistfully placing it in the laundry room trash can.

Eccentric Stars

I've always liked this block. I found out last month that it's called Eccentric Star. I had a couple of piles of solid squares put together with a diagonal line marked on the back of the lighter square and stored in a box labeled "cut projects to piece" for many years. After I saw the leaders and enders book, I started sewing them together at the start and end of other things I was piecing. I had enough to make these two new tops, each about 28 inches square. I wrote about this in a previous post.

I made this Eccentric Star block, 6 1/2" square, for a baby boy who is about to be born.

Fall Colors Quilt

Here is my finished quilt, which I have called "Fall Colors" on all the lists of unfinished quilts I've written over the last twenty years. The previous post describes some of its construction. It is a queen sized quilt, about 86" x 94".

Fall Colors Quilt Construction

I am making a two-sided quilt using a quilt-as-you-go method that I dreamed up almost 20 years ago. The top consists of six inch appliquéd blocks that represent the mountains of New Hampshire in the fall, separated by two inch sashing. The back consists of six inch squares of winter colored fabric, separated by dark blue sashing. This picture shows the first four rows of the project completed, plus the back of the next six rows (the front rows are hiding underneath). Read more and you will understand why I put this project off for so long.

In order to keep myself from running away screaming, I'm putting together a little top in between seams using the leaders and enders method. (Read about this on the Quiltville web site.) I had marked some solid squares on the diagonal to make into half-square triangles, also quite a few years ago. The squares sat in a box labelled "cut projects to piece" for a long time. I don't know what I had in mind back then, but once I heard about the leaders and enders method, I started putting them together and ended up with enough squares to make two wall hangings with nine eccentric stars in each one.

I am sewing strips of six inch blocks, joined by two inch sashing, to strips of batting. I will sew the top and back strips to the batting along each seam, front and back, at the same time. Here are the batting strips, cut as precisely as I could manage, folded and labeled on my cutting table.

Here is my diversion, waiting to be trimmed so I can continue piecing the eccentric stars as I go along.

In this picture, I fold back the back strip, smooth it down and pin it to the batting. I have already joined the front and back strips to the batting on the left side - that was the first step, and it's not shown. The strip is upside-down in this picture.

Here I turn the strip over and line up the top strip as best I can. The batting doesn't shift and the blocks are the same size, so this usually works out pretty well. Notice that the seams are already sewn together. When I first started putting this quilt together, I tried putting the loose squares and sashing strips onto the batting, and sewing them all together at once. This did not work at all. So I took everything apart and pieced all the rows first.

I have a "leader" in the machine already...

...so that I will not have loose threads at the start of the seam.

Now I add the "ender" which will stay in the machine and become the leader for the next seam. Note there is a bit of extra batting at the bottom of the strip. That is for the long strip of sashing between rows.

When I remove the strip, I cut off the "leader" and put it aside.

I repeat this step once for each seam - 18 times total including left and right sides. Here is a finished row.

When I finished this row, I could not resist feeding the rest of my leader/ender pairs through the machine so that I could iron them and get them ready to finish.

I will have nine eccentric star blocks when I make the next row.

Now I attach the sashing where this row will join to the next. I attach the front first, and then the back (I didn't show this step).

Because I sew the seams with the front on top, the front scootches down about 1/8 inch. I don't want to use the walking foot, so I just live with this. It actually works out well. But the double seam at the top comes from the fact that when I sew the long sashing to the back side, the seam comes out in a different place. So the top sashing will end up shorter than two inches. Because of this I have to trim the top sashing to make sure it's straight, and I have to trim 1/8 inch off of the batting too. It sounds like extra work, but it seems to me that it's inevitable. The nature of this process causes the work to shift some, and this is the step where I have to make some corrections.

In the picture above I've also made marks on the long sashing, using a blue water-removing marking pen, that will help me line up the vertical sashing with the next strip. This is very important. I didn't do this between strips one and two, and I think I will have to pick it out and do it over.

Now I am ready to quilt. I pin the sashing together so it doesn't get caught in the machine.

Originally I was going to do some very decorative machine quilting. I was going to do different colored random paths in each colored section, and free-motion leaves on the sashing. I actually did two strips this way at some point. I might have gone on like that but the batting deteriorated and I had to take everything apart. Now that I have only a month to finish this, I decided to use the decorative stitches that my old machine can do and just make a line of variable zig-zag along the tops of each "mountain." The mountains were supposed to be continuous from one block to the next, and this choice of quilting really brings that out. Plus it only takes about ten minutes, and it's easy. Necessity is the mother of invention. I am not quilting the sashing. Because I sew the front and back to the batting along all seams, there is already some quilting done in that step. It is good firm batting, so there won't be any problem. I can probably even wash and iron the thing when it's done.

I have just sewn the long sashing on the bottom front of the previous row to the top of this row. I didn't show that step. Now I've turned the whole quilt over and I'm joining the batting with a herringbone stitch. I just catch the battings from behind, alternating on each side.

The final step is to fold the back sashing over and tack it down with a blindstitch. This is somewhat time-consuming, but it looks great.

So now I have five rows done! There are ten rows in all, plus borders - I should be done in a week, in time for the June 30th deadline. I plan to finish one row per day except Wednesday and then the borders next Sunday.

One final note - After I finished row five, I was so eager to piece my eccentric stars, that I got a head start on row six. All I need to do now is quilt it and attach it to row five.

"What is a hobby anyway?"

I just read this in Aldo Leopold's book A Sand County Almanac.

"What is a hobby anyway? Where is the line of demarcation between hobbies and ordinary normal pursuits? I have been unable to answer this question to my own satisfaction. At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant. Certainly many of our most satisfying avocations today consist of making something by hand which machines can usually make more quickly and cheaply, and sometimes better. Nevertheless I must in fairness admit that in a different age the mere fashioning of a machine might have been an excellent hobby. Galileo, I fancy, derived a real and personal satisfaction when he set the ecclesiastical world on its ear by embodying in a new catapult some natural law that St. Peter had inadvertently omitted to catalogue. Today the invention of a new machine, however noteworthy to industry, would, as a hobby, be trite stuff. Perhaps we have here the real inwardness of our question: A hobby is a defiance of the contemporary. It is an assertion of those permanent values which the momentary eddies of social evolution have contravened or overlooked. If this is true, then we may also say that every hobbyist is inherently a radical, and that [her] tribe is inherently a minority."

I write this because when I described Project Linus to a friend, she wondered why the money and time we spent on knitting blankets by hand couldn't be used to buy a much greater number of manufactured blankets. This statement completely misses the essence of the work: that the good of devotion, whereby a person has spent a significant amount of time crafting a blanket in the hope of comforting a stranger, is a fundamental emotional value.