Doggy Bag

Last month around this time something internal switched itself off, and I've spent the last 4 weeks drifting through a depression. I could get the bare minimum done that any given day required, but for the most part I acted as a lap for Zoe and read Dick Francis novels, starting with his first and chain reading the days away.

Last weekend it became apparent that I was going to have to get my rear in gear and get some sewing done. The annual Competition for Sweet Adelines Region 10 is coming up this Saturday, and I wanted to make a couple of things for my chorus Secret Sister. I mainly wanted to make a personalized Cabana Mesh Tote bag for her, and I knew it would take several days.

I started with this, a hastily photographed signature on a sign-up sheet at one of our rehearsals. My i-for-idiot flip-phone doesn't do close-up photography well.

Double the Pleasure

These were made (made), sandwiched (sandwiched), and quilted back-to-back (time-wise, not fabric-wise), then finished (= washed, dried, photographed) yesterday:

Back to Quilts

This sugar skull project has been a flimsy for several weeks now, but it's been bunched up on the end of my ironing board waiting for me to finish the October banner and get back to quilt making. I ironed the final 9 seams this morning, then flang it on the floor for its photo-op.

Cat scans improve everything. 70" x 90"

An Ass out of ... just me

I'm great with assumptions. I make them freely and rarely question them, so they feel comfortable floating around in my brain. They know they won't get kicked out anytime soon.

Final Trip to the N1C Stash

Since I had committed to a classic radiating design for one of the last two tops, I decided that the final TATW top would be laid out as a chevron, with the dusty rose fabric as the only element of continuity. Three attempts at a layout finally brought me to this:

Not the full top, but enough to show the design. The lines follow the dusty rose fabric.

Penultimate TATW

Burying threads is a great way to spend time thinking of other things, such as the layouts for the final two N1C (Not 100% Cotton) quilts. I had been spending my days (after using up my 'good' vision quilting first thing in the morning) sewing up the strips for tops 5 and 6. I knew by now that I wanted the classic Trip Around the World setting for one set of strips, but offset. So: to the computer! I set up a 5x7 grid and started plopping in images of one of the blocks I had sewn up, et voila:

Trip Around the World, Nestling Seams Tutorial Tweak

Bonnie Hunter at Quiltville has already created a great tutorial for a scrappy TATW, called "Scrappy Trips", so I will credit her but not steal from her. This post contains the various ways I deviated from her instructions, and in so doing managed to make all the seams on all the blocks nestle with each other, no matter which direction a block was turned.

It was at this step

that I discovered two key points to making nestling seams. 

Obsess much?

My various Leader/Ender projects, brought in as I finished one N1C top after another this past week or three, ended up being their own finishes as well. For a while it was hard to tell which project was Leading or Ending, so I just thought of everything being constructed as "Followers".

I also had an apostrophe as to where I could hang the flimsies while it remained so cold outside: on the living room drapes! The piano blocks a lower corner, but the overall effect remains.

The first top, in which I ended up with non-nestling seam allowances:

N1C Scrappy Trip Around the World (planned placement), 60"x84"

Proof

 "The proof of the pudding is in the eating." Just sayin'. Unless you make yours with high-content alcohol, there is never proof in the pudding.

But on to the real topic of this post: nestling Scrappy Trip Around the World seams.

I started sewing together the shoe box full of carefully stowed strips last week. I couldn't wait to get 4 blocks constructed and on the design wall!

TATW, with intent

Right after finishing the last N1C TATW, I pulled out the shoe box of several hundred N1C strips and grabbed all the pink/juvenile ones sitting on top. To those I added some green check, medium blue, a red, and whatever other light or mostly-white fabrics I could dig up until I had 210 strips to work with (35 blocks for a 5x7 layout). This will be a very random and mostly 'low volume' top, definitely for a child. This time I was going to iron, construct, and lay out every block the same. Would all the seams nestle then?

I had only two criteria: no samesies touching, and doubles were okay (just not side-by-side). In fact, due to the sheer volume of them, most blocks would need two strips of the green check. With that, I just reached into the box holding the jumble of strips and kept pairing a random strip to a green check, pairing and sewing until 210 strips were down to 105 pairs. The pairs got randomly sewn into segments of fours until 35 were made, then the remaining pairs were sewn onto those.

Only five blocks were constructed of six 16" strips. The rest were made up of what I refer to as "short stacks": 16+ inch-long strips in toto, but that length was made up of 2 or 3 segments, as above. Creating a final TATW block from these means lots of fits and starts, which really eats up any L&E project being sewn alongside.

TATW, thoughts on.

 Nearly a year ago, near the end of one of my care-giver breaks, I made 35 scrappily planned Trip Around the World blocks. Without a home or drawer or closet into which I could shove them once done, they lurked atop any stable surface on my cutting area. Until yesterday.

Looking for something easy to stitch together, I decided to grab that pile, forgo any previous ideas of grouping like fabrics to create subsections of control and order within the inherent scrappiness, divide the pile roughly in half, and sew together pairs of blocks with abandon. Let's hear it for spontaneity!

Except...

Invasion of the Sleep Snatcher

The whole time I was working on my mother's quilt, another project kept simmering in the back of my mind. It wasn't simmering quietly, either. It was actively invading my sleep with weird dreams. So, as soon as I could in the evening after I finished "Jackson" (my goofy name for it, not my mother's!), I set to work preparing for Bonnie Hunter's Scrappy Trip Around the World using all those 2.5" strips cut from my bin of N1C (Not 100% Cotton) fabrics last week.

First thing I did was sort those 600-700 strips into lights/mediums/darks. Lots of hard squinting as I examined all those strips covering my cutting table, trying to determine whether a light or dark was really a medium (and vice-versa). That brought me to dinnertime. After another night of weird dreams, I was more than ready to take inventory and figure out my plan of attack.

One more albatross

There was still a bin weighing heavily on my psyche while I was in Oregon and even more so when I got back home and added more to it from the scraps I brought back with me: my N1C (Not 100% Cotton) bin.

Trippin'

 As I was working on the mindless string blocks, another project landed in my lap: Trip Around The World.

Not the most flattering of shots, but a true capture of her joie de vivre. That's me in the background, holding the bolt of the "awesome" doxie fabric that ended up in my prototype TATW block.

Last year one of our Magpies flew from this mortal coil. In memory of her, the Nest is making a quilt for her granddaughter--to be given at her Bat Mitzvah--using fabrics from her stash. Her cousin and fellow Magpie is coordinating the effort and getting fabrics to all those who've volunteered to make blocks. I had thrown in my hat when this project was being discussed; I knew I could manage to make 4 blocks during my time home, but that would have to be the extent of my contribution.

While waiting for my allotment of fabrics, I figured I'd get familiar with the tube technique Bonnie Hunter shares on her Quiltville website for a Scrappy Trip Around the World, which is what the Magpies decided to make. Pulling all strips that were 16" or longer from my 2.5" bin, I built this:

Not much WOW factor in this, because it turns out I don't have many long 2.5" strips!

The technique is easy (although I made a tweak to Bonnie's instructions that eliminates the unpicking of one column per block*) and the results are fun.