One Nibble at a Time

Sometimes the "elephant" seems too massive for a full bite, and one must nibble her way through to the other side.

I've spent this weekend nibbling on several large mounds piled hither and thither. During the week I've been working on quilting the Angry Birds (Ugh!) sandwich I created almost immediately after pinning the batik top from last post. I've had the backing for it for yonks (can you tell I enjoy British and Ozzie sitcoms?), and recently franken'ed a batting as well, so there was no reason for it to still be hanging about. Plus, I knew exactly how I wanted to quilt all aspects of it, so it was easy to put it ahead of the batik sandwich (the quilting of which I'm still pondering).

The "easy" parts were stippled, their borders filled with a simple wave pattern, then it came time to quilt the strips of 5-patches. I bitched and moaned about doing these with the last one, but this time I decided I'd go with option 2 of the three I set out for myself at the conclusion of that quilting session.

Queue

We've all been there: a room with a hint of a suggestion of a loose idea of a line. Nobody's officially in charge, but every person in that room knows exactly their position in the invisible queue. Newcomers are eyeballed suspiciously--will they try to jump ahead? Fat chance of that happening; a gentle correction ("I believe she was here before you") generally keeps things well in (invisible) line. The only time I've heard any kind of disagreement in these situations is when one person suggests, "You were here before me?" and the other replies, "No, no--you go first."

This phenomenon isn't restricted to mere mortals, by the way. As various projects were coming out of Leader-Ender status and into Full-on-Project mode . . .

All the triangle squares for the Lady of the Lake centers, sewn into 3- and 5-square strips.

A Finish and a Sandwich

This got bound, photo'ed, and tumbled in the drier today, ready for donation to Community First! Village. Diamonds and Pinwheels, finally ready for its new home.

71" x 90"

Floral Finish

Another finish!

"Clarissa" pattern from ge*designs

Diversion

With some personal tumult going on at the moment, it's been hard to get terribly enthused about going into my studio these past few days, other than for the occasional Dump-'n'-Dash. But yesterday I had a yearning to accomplish something by way of quilting (and I needed some quiet thinking time), so I sat down with my rail blocks (which earlier I had already paired up and sewn together) and promptly made a mistake that required unsewing half the misbegotten seam.

I looked around at my options. Did I want to get up and go all the way around the table to boot up the computer and look at the layout I had planned for the rail blocks?

Stalled

The COVID caught me last week and it's taken me until yesterday to feel well enough to be in public again. But my down time wasn't unproductive time. I cleared several hundred emails from my various mailboxes, something I kept putting off for a time I was under the weather and recliner-bound anyway. I also was able, after the first 3 days, to summon the interest and energy to get into my studio and sew a bit.

The first thing I did was take a picture of what was hanging on the design wall, so I could look at it from a distance and make any changes deemed necessary.

Now that's a full design wall!

Vanity

I've been idly wondering what vanity I'll carry with me to the Afterlife, and I think it'll be about my intelligence. It's useful, and plenty, and I'm proud of it.

Always have been.

 

Most of the time.

Letting go

As soon as I trimmed all the 4.5" triangle squares (previous post), I started sewing them to the dark/medium and light 3.5"squares I had cut weeks earlier, with an eye toward making this top.

Hide and Seek

As I grew out of childhood and into my teens, I remember thinking how tedious this game was, especially as The Seeker.

Its allure continues to dim the older I get, logarithmically I'd venture to guess.

As I close out August staying inside and away from the punishing Texas heat, chipping away at several piles in an effort to get them from over- to merely whelming, I find myself seeking things that "just a minute ago" were right there at my fingertips.

A Lady by any other name . . .

... would smell as sweet? Maybe not.

Regardless, there seems to be many versions of the block pattern "Lady of the Lake". Like the words "decimate" and "enervate", the Lady of the Lake block means different things to different people.

I've had friends send pictures of the blocks they've made. Nann sent a couple, one of which she blogged about here (I love the flashes of red!) In my wanderings about the interwebs, I came across three variations:

Small triangle squares on two sides only.

What most people seem to associate with this block name, and matches the 18 blocks that were already constructed.

Reminds me of a Native American pattern.

Lady of the Lake . . . ish

This morning I putzed around with the various elements of this project. I had 18 finished blocks (measuring at most 10.25" square), 82 centers (measuring roughly 6.5" square), and a theoretical 720 HTSs (measuring 2.5" square). For starters, how many blocks could I complete with those 720 HTSs? (Counts on fingers--720 divided by 16--ah! Forty-five blocks can be completed.)

Then I wondered what various settings are 'out there' for Lady of the Lake blocks, and how is an on-point setting handled?

That's when I started to notice something: the typical LotL block doesn't look like the 18 that I "inherited".

Sample of the 18 blocks on left, traditional Lady of the Lake block on the right.

And then there was one

One piece (out of many), that is!

Left column cut out from picture--really 7 x 9 blocks for a finished size of 70" x 90"

This sews up cuter than it originally looked on the design wall, so I'm glad of that. Having done one, however, that satisfied the itch and I can go on to other designs.

I do NOT heart this

I'm working my way to the finish of the Heart You QAYG top. The ten rows have been measured and the average length calculated (with butted seam allowances, they tend to grow).

Binding thoughts

I've quilted the sandwich featured in the Gemischt post (I am LOVING my new weightlifting system!) and am in the process of sewing down the binding. I decided to use up ALL my 1.75" binding scraps, acknowledging that would mean having to sew the binding down by hand, but also relishing the fact that those scraps would be GONE, never to be replenished. I figured out some time ago that 1.75" was just a little too narrow for comfort, double-fold-binding-wise, and have been cutting bindings at 2" for several years now. Yesterday I simply decided I'd use up the narrow ones, once and for all.

There were some long strips but LOTS more short strips. I briefly worried about and wondered how to avoid seams in the corners, what with all the connecting of the itty-bitty pieces. Well, DUH Carolyn: plan the corners and put the long pieces there! And as long as I'm planning the corners, I might as well use the dark scraps so the mitered pattern would shine without competition.

To-Do-sday: October Banner

I'm behind on getting my mom's October banner done. Quelle suprise! I've been collecting ideas for the last couple/three weeks and by this past weekend I had a plan.

Sixteen inches across is my goal for each banner. Driving to "Apple Country" every year was a family tradition when I was a kid, so a paper-pieced block of apples in a bushel basket will be included. National Book Month seems a great way to subtly poke the political bear by depicting a library shelf of banned books (with a 2" pumpkin as a bookend as a nod to Hallowe'en).

Leader-Ender: Lady of the Lake

I'm feeling quite rumbly in my tumbly today (not in a good way) so while Zoe and I relax in my comfy recliner, I'm looking over the Lady of the Lake blocks I "inherited" from a dearly- and recently-departed Magpie. I'd promised myself that if Bonnie Hunter's 2023 Leader-Ender project wasn't something I could make with pieces I'd already cut using her Scrap User's guidelines, that I'd focus on the LotL blocks instead.

I decided it wasn't.

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.

2018 Leader-Ender Challenge

I'm usually not much of a joiner-of-group-projects (having been burned more than once with block swaps), but Bonnie Hunter's Leader-Ender Challenge last year caught my attention. Firstly, I was finally caught up on all her posts and was reading in the present, so could actually join in time. Secondly, it seemed a great way to use up my large stash of 3.5" bricks and strips. Thirdly, 2" squares have long been my go-to leader-enders, so I had a large stash of 4-patches already sewn up, waiting for a project.

From the bin of 3.5" pieces I pulled all the novelty, bored with, how-do-I-use-this?, and otherwise unfavorite fabric strips and bricks (3.5"x6.5"), stacking the neutrals in one pile, and everything else in another.

From there I paired them up as they happened, cutting triangle pairs as I went.

Geocities 7-1998: Mary's Quilt

This is an experiment in republishing html pages I created for my now-extinct GeoCities account, back in the day.

Mary's Wedding Gift quilt

"1,000 Pyramids"

This shows most of my sister's wedding gift quilt "1,000 Pyramids" from Diana McClun/Laura Nownes' book "Quilts! Quilts!! Quilts!!!". Except for the batting, this quilt was made only from material I had on hand. I managed to complete it in just 5 weeks, mailing it to Mary and Jim in plenty of time for their wedding. All machine pieced and quilted. Measures approximately 85" x 101".

The general color theme of this quilt was blue & white. "Blue" ranged from green to blue-violet, "white" was anything from white to dark tan. Various other colors snuck in too -- I'm sure there's some pink in there -- but that just adds to the charm.