Crumby Finish

Yay! 

91" x 70" Construction story at this link

Basting another!

Lookit her go!

 

Being Reminded

Nann's been busy catching up with blogs, and the comments she added to my last three postings reminded me that I haven't written anything for 2 months. What could possibly have distracted me (she wonders, facetiously)?

The week after I wrote my previous post, I was in Oregon again to move my mother here to Texas with me. The past two months have been a flurry of furnishing and getting her situated in her new Memory Care "apartment" (the facility is 2 miles from me), getting her Medicare insurance squared away, appointments with new doctors, three ER visits, two hospital admissions/discharges, and trying to get her to sleep at night! It's been intense, and I learned pretty quickly that I'd need to take mornings for myself and devote the 1-5 pm time slot to visiting and amusing her.

During her recent hospital stays I was reminded daily that the elastic on my mask was absolutely shot and needed replacing.

Satisfying Sunday

These have been slowly growing, to the point where Dad's/Mom's top has been taken down and stored on the quilting table (within sight, ever guilt-inducing) so I can enjoy the secondary pattern when the completed (12" raw) blocks are trimmed. There will be 48 blocks total, set 6x8.

Dad's top, Mom's top

 About a month ago I unpacked and dismantled the only shirt of my father's I brought home with me. After it was "deboned", I made a very uncharacteristic decision: I'd make a quilt from it. Immediately. I wouldn't fold up all the pieces and stuff them into one of my shoeboxes of less-than-a-yard, fretting further down the line over whether the pieces cut from it were medium, light, dark, tan, brown, green, what-have-you. (I always fall into that trap, being swayed more by the 100% Cotton label than common sense.)

With limited yardage, I figured I'd treat the shirt as a novelty print (ideas for which I've been collecting for some time) and try to find something that would need large segments. That would eliminate yardage-loss-through-too-many-seam-allowances, and showcase the 'Hawaiian' flavor of the shirt fabric. The largest square I could get from the sleeves was 8". So the search began!

Roughly 8 patterns were selected and culled through, until this one stood alone:

I liked the idea of the large areas, but really hated the way the sashing broke the continuity of the lines. In fact, I saved it in my folder as "without sashing".

So I printed out this picture, cut out the sashing and taped the paper back together, then looked at it as a function of a large middle square (instead of the chisel shapes of the original pattern).

Essentially, it's squares and 4-patches set on point.

Oh yeah!

I'm home again, briefly (as in: 'fly in Thursday fly out Sunday' brief), just long enough to do income taxes with my husband and pack for a longer stay in Oregon (i.e. packing a suitcase instead of a backpack). The end of May should give all of us (my siblings and me) a good idea of how to proceed going forward.

I walked into the studio today and saw this on the design wall:

Aw-w-w-w-w! They're so cute! I had forgotten this was where I had left things, playing with the dinky *HTSs and the short crumbs left from string quilts. If memory serves, I had run out (or was quickly running out) of the muslin, so it's just as well I was torn away when I was.

These are the makings of my version of this quilt:

"Converging Corners" from the blog "Film in the Fridge"

 

It's the building out of the opposite corners that will add the dynamic element to these blocks, once they're all sewn together. In the meantime, they'll quietly wait there on the design wall until I'm back for good, probably in two months.

*Seriously? I've said it before and I stand by my opinion: the squares are split in half by triangles. Shouldn't it be Half Triangle Square (HTS) blocks, instead of Half Square Triangle (HST) blocks?

Oh, crumbs!

 I don't collect "crumbs". I don't! I'm content to toss bits that measure smaller than 1.5" x 1.5" into the trash. Others might save those bits to stuff pet cushions, or sew them together to make "found" fabric, but I've better things to do with my time. And besides, there has to be a line, you know?

Except: guess what? I've been collecting crumbs for years and never realized it.

When I got to the end/bottom of my string blocks and string bin, I realized that the pieces I've been saving/rolling over from project to project, the ones that fell into the at least 3/4" x 2.25" category but under 4" in length, were too small to use in a standard string quilt but too big to throw away guilt-free. They were, in fact, crumbs.

Some of them could be used to build onto the rolling 2.5" scrap border.

I knew the shorter pieces could probably work at the ends of triangle blocks such as spiderwebs, but I had no immediate plans for that kind of string quilt (nor were there enough to really make a go of it). The thought of saving them without an ultimate, imaginable purpose was surprisingly stressful.