Tag: Christmas Star

Quilts

Christmas Star Quilt Binding is On

Elizabeth E.1 Comment

Finished!

Every six months our church has a conference they broadcast over the internet, and I take time to sit and ponder and listen, but I’m better off if I keep my hands busy while I work.  This year, I worked on two quilts.  Getting the binding sewn on the Christmas Star quilt was a priority, for we’re in October now and we all know what that means: December is tomorrow (or feels like it).

I had read Red Pepper’s blog about the way she does her corners–up and around in one continuous piece.  I’d never been really happy with this method as so many quilt corners done like this are slightly rounded, not a pristine sharp-edge tip.  So I decided to try giving the corner a scootch more room.  The instructions, shown in the crazy mom quilts tutorial, fold back the corner.  I decided to fold it back four or five threads more, as shown above by the teensy lip near the pin, then continued my stitching down the edge.

I was really happy with this.  It gave it just enough room to make a nice tight, sharp corner, rather than the usual rounded one that can happen with this method.

This is the back of the corner, and if you look closely, you can see my stitches going up the back of the miter to anchor the corner.  I still hand sew around the binding, but the way the old fingers are creaking with aches and pains from arthritis, maybe I’d either better stop grading so much, or learn to sew it on by machine!

Anyway, I still have to do the label, but I consider this done enough to throw it on the bed come December 1st.  I just hope that at that point, our heat wave will be long gone.

100 Quilts

Christmas Star Quilt

Elizabeth E.

I was ready for a new Christmas Quilt. So one day in October, when I had twenty minutes free of grading, I thought about what I wanted, and really really thought I could get it done by December 1st. So I cut out a bunch of patches, and sewed up this square.

Ick.
Then the grading kicked in, Christmas fol-de-rol arrived and the patches still sat on the cutting mat.
This whole time I’ve had this patch up on the pin wall, and have thought, well. No.

Here I spent all this money on this fabric and I hate the quilt. I remember evaluating dresses I was making in high school, hating them all, thinking why did I waste my time on this? And then I remember my mother saying to me that you can’t judge the success or failure of a sewn outfit until you get the hem in. Of course, she’s right. She’s my mother. So obviously I can’t judge a quilt by one block.

Another factor in the design was my push-back against one-patch quilts–simple designs I see all over the web on my blogs. Quilts used to be about the grid and the geometric-ness of it, if I can make up that word. Then the art quilt hit, and people left the grid behind and certainly the quilt world is better for it. I love many of them.

And the current craze of one-patch or simple designs I think is a result of the large-scale design on a piece of fabric–a design that would just not look good cut up into teensy squares/triangles/rectangles and then sewn back together.

But when I glance at a bed, while I like the large-scale prints and the simple designs, I still long to see something more traditional and perhaps more elaborate, a secondary design that might percolate up from the first blocks placed together. So I got out my trusty-dusty quilt block book, which is simply pages of flannel interspersed with paper. It allows me to plan out a block in a portable form.

Four blocks done. I like how it’s coming along. I no longer believe it will be done quickly–it takes some planning and sewing time–but I think I’ll have it done by this Christmas. Maybe.

Christmas Quilts · Journal Entry

Piecing Equals Writing?

Elizabeth E.

I’ve been working on this quilt for too long.  I’m really tired of it, but I can’t stop now as I spent a gank of money on the fabric and don’t want to just put it up on the shelf.  Besides I know I’ll like it when it’s done.  I hope.

When I was in grad school and slogging through the writing of my novel, it feel like sometimes I was being tortured, one paragraph at a time.  There’s days when even though you are sure you’re writing The Great American Novel, it’s all just too much.  I wanted short stories! Poems! Essays!  Anything that had a page count of less than twenty pages.

And now?  I want to make a baby quilt! A lap quilt! Anything with a block count of less than twenty blocks.