Still Plugging Along

January 23, 2013January 21, 2013 Elizabeth E.7 Comments

Well? The name of this linky party is Wednesday Works in Progress, right? I’ve made great progress, for I’ve gotten some projects off the pin wall and other blocks out of the box.

This is the project I removed from the wall–the pillow shams for my wonky star quilt.

And here’s what took its place. The first version. I had made a lot of wonky blocks in blues, and then a bunch in green/reds. I had made these in November of 2011–so it’s been a while since I’d seen them, or even remember the idea I had. I think it was to intersperse the green/reds inbetween the blues, but when I tried that, I hate it. Of course, I was also watching the Inauguration and kept breaking off my concentration to wait for Mrs. Obama to appear so I could see what she was wearing to the Inaugural Ball. Jason Wu, apparently.

I like it better with just the blues. Now somehow I’ve got to get it together. Probably not this week–too many interruptions. Like going to Road to California quilt show. Or as I like to refer to it (because the jurors who pick the quilts seem to LOVE spangles and crystals on their quilts), Road to Hollywood. But still, it is a quilt show and there are vendors and lots of interesting people and old friends and good things to see and I’m totally jazzed about it. Any one else headed there?

So now I’ve got 19 green/red blocks that don’t have a home. Maybe I’ll put them on the back? However, I already purchased some lovely blue/white variegated thread to quilt it with. So two quilts? I only have enough energy to do one more Christmas quilt, so these will probably go back in the box until November.

Click back over to Lee’s blog, Freshly Pieced to see more Works in Progress.

WIP for the New Year

January 8, 2013December 28, 2024 Elizabeth E.7 Comments

I can’t believe I’m still working on this. No, it’s not the Christmas quilt, although that is still very much in play. It’s the Autumn Quilt.

Since I started collecting fabrics for this oh, 8 or 9 years ago, and started cutting and sewing this quilt 2 years ago, it’s no wonder that I let it sit for a while after getting it back from the quilter as I couldn’t figure out what to bind it in. You know we all hunger and thirst over the cute bindings that Red Pepper puts on her quilts, but sometimes it’s best not to over think this quilting thing and just move forward. This is a plaid that was in the quilt, spliced up with a couple of other prints, as I didn’t have enough of the plaid.

I don’t know why, but I love the autumn colors. Living in LA, I get autumn about NOW, in January, when the liquid ambers turn maple-like colors. I went looking for quotes about autumn to find this quilt’s title, and all of them were about the fall that they have on the Eastern seaboard, or New England or mid-western areas of the country–so romantic about leaves and color and the “twilight of the year” and death and harvest and so on. I found a quote I like, but I’m still letting it mull over in my mind.

I mean, I can’t just call this “Autumn Quilt,” now can I?

And this is where I am on the pillow shams for my wonky star Christmas quilt. I decided to make a normal star, as they are 16″ finished, slap on some fabric on the top and bottom to get it to equal the size of a pillow sham: 20″ by 26.”

I want a flange around the outside edge, so I cut about another 100 2-1/2″ squares, and sewed them together in strips.

So now they look like this. I stopped because I’d taken the quilt over to the quilter, and gave her the red/green thread I’d purchased at Superior Threads when I’d gone through there at Christmastime.

I stopped because I had to get the syllabus and the course calendar and the expanded course calendar done and sent to the school copy center, and while I was at it, I sent over vats and barrels of more things to the copy center, trying to prep up for the first few weeks of school, which starts next week. But it was oh-so-nice to not have to create those things from scratch–to be able to find them on the computer and send them over with minor alterations.

I may actually get more quilting done this semester than last, given the fact that I’m teaching a course I’ve taught before. And that is a very good thing.

And lastly, I had a lovely surprise from a fellow quilter: she heart-attacked my door on my birthday, which was this past week. I’ve never been heart-attacked before, so I laughed and took a picture to remind me forever. Thank you Lisa! I had other lovely gifts to celebrate that day from other friends and family, phone calls from my children and some friends. A good birthday, for sure.

And then, just to remind me that I’m no spring chicken anymore, my back went into spasms the next day and I’ve been ~~wincing, whining and moaning~~ a good girl and not complained once about it. Like all things, this too will pass.

Hope you are all getting your new year off to a good start!

Something to Think About · WIP

Wonky Stars, Wonky World

December 19, 2012December 14, 2024 Elizabeth E.9 Comments

I know you must think I fell off of a cliff. I posted on Lee’s Freshly Pieced blog as a guest host, (who has since removed the post) then went dark and silent for lo, these many weeks. Below is a composite of what went on, minus the rolling-of-the-eyes pictures while reading student papers and grading grading grading.

Besides grading, we got a new sofa, I made vats of a potato dish for our church Christmas party, sewed giant canvas bags for my grandsons’ Christmas presents (we gave them small tool boxes and broken electronics from the local TV repair shop, so they could take them apart with their new tools), decorated the Christmas tree, celebrated Christmas with my son and his family, pulled out an old block swap project then put it away, started on Secret Project A, Secret Project B (it is Christmas, after all) and then would up my time making Butternut Crunch Toffee and Christmas Caramels.

I have been feeling much like the grandma in the snow.

And then last weekend’s horrible events happened, and like you, everything in my world pretty much came to a halt, and I watched the news about Sandy Hook, read about the lives of the slain children, and cried and cried. And one really bad day, both my daughter’s and my tender emotions collided in a colossal disagreement over nothing, and I realized that the resultant tears on both our parts was more indication that our days would be forever changed by our concern for twenty-eight families in Connecticut. I wanted to write about it, but mostly I just wanted to gather a quilt around the closest child, read them good books and ward off the outside world to protect them. How to move from this wonky, capsized world back to Christmas?

Start slowly, by doing the things that right the world after a terrific up-ending.

I wrote Christmas cards. Thinking about those closest to me enabled me to brave the mall and do some gift-buying. I spent time with good people, friends, church friends, family. Many many years ago, after I went through my Horribles on a tear-filled Christmas (a divorce), the counselor said that trying to get back into a routine would help everyone. So I made some toffee. Then my annual Christmas Caramels, while listening to Christmas carols.

And realized that I’m no good at making Wonky Stars. I can get the star “blades” on crookedly, a necessary ingredient for wonkiness. But I keep messing up the placement of the star blades direction, like the one above.

So I would lay them out, and invariably have to unpick one. I decided to plow through it, for if I left this project midway, I might never be able to get back in.

The stars turned out appropriately wonky, maybe more wonky than they should have. But more importantly, the stars are done. And I hope to find some time in the sewing studio to sew the companion blocks to this quilt.

Next week, we’ll be spending some time with my family, with my husband’s family, looking at lights, singing Christmas hymns at church. We’ll also be listening to Uncle Earl play Lady of Spain on his accordion (a rare treat), celebrate the season with my Dad and Mom’s great cooking, and yes, like most families, we’ll tell jokes, admire the babies, trade stories of cancer, new furniture, failed toffee and failed marriages, changed jobs, successes in grad school, all of us sharing bits and pieces of our patchworked lives.

I wish you all the best of a patchworked Christmas!

Quilts · WIP

Autumn Quilt Borders

November 14, 2012 Elizabeth E.4 Comments

For this WIP Wednesday, kindly hosted by Lee of Freshly Pieced fabrics (click to head back there and see what others are doing), I chose to resurrect an ancient Work In Progress: my autumn quilt.

I had updated my computer software to work with my printer, and while you think that’s a strange way to begin a post about borders, I depend on it a lot (I use Quilt-Pro) to help me work out templates and dimensions. So I had kind of mocked up this one, but didn’t want to go to all the trouble to do square-in-a-square on the borders.

So this was the next version. While it seems silly to spend time at a computer when you’re working on a quilt, I did it for two reason: my annual Horrid Sickness had descended (complete with a 2-hour Urgent Care visit) and I felt like sludge most of the week, but more importantly, I was running on low in the autumn fabrics that I’d used to make this quilt, and I wanted to use what I had instead of buying more. I’d been collecting these for about a decade, so the colors weren’t going to be easy to find, even if I did want to buy more.

Then I got a tiny nudge in my brain to use the golds in the outside Flying Geese block. Anything I do in the program will be more pronounced, as I’m working with solids, but I did like this version.

Here’s the quilt.

So here are all the new Flying Geese pieces laid out around the quilt. I had stopped with that small stripy border and was ready to yank it off if I didn’t like it, but. . . I like it. Trust me on this. I simply did two Half-Square-Triangles (HST) for the corners and now have to figure out how it will all work.

I laid out all the giant EPP hexagons on my guest bedroom bed to see how they all looked together. I love them, but have lots more figuring out to do. That will have to wait until after Christmas, I think!

And here’s your funny for the day: