Chuck Nohara Redux

October 10, 2016October 4, 2016 Elizabeth E.15 Comments

(Redux: brought back, from the Latin word meaning returning, — or — from reducere to lead back. First Known Use: 1860. So now you know.)

Well…I posted this photo recently, musing about how many more of these little suckers I was going to make. Since they come from 2″ line drawings in Chuck Nohara’s book, any size is possible, but Susan and I went with 6″ finished. Which is fun. And small. And I still have to make all the sashing and all that, so it has come to the time to think about sizing.

I tend to like square quilts. And with four more, this quilt would be square. I know I have 4 per month, three more months, but RETURNING to my senses, I realized I was pretty much done. As one of the more fun quilt projects I’ve done, by teaming up with Susan gave me great motivation to get things done (because I knew she would). If you jump in, try hooking up with the Instagram group and letting the motivation of those women pull you along. But still, it’s time for me to be done.

So here are my four final blocks:

I chose from the rest of what we’d identified as the last blocks of the year, pulling forward ones that I thought would blend with what I already have. This also gives me a chance to take off my least favorite block and move it to the back (I’m not telling which one it is). Susan and I have also agreed to make each other a signature block, but keep it a surprise, so I have that one too. Whatever is leftover after all this will go on the back.

Christina Xu, in her article “Your Project Deserves a Good Death,” notes that:

Most of the people I know are compulsive starters. We constantly create new projects, companies, organizations, and events; sometimes, we even get roped into adopting other people’s projects and entities…Almost all of them will not be the last thing we start.

She goes on to say that we don’t often know how to finish up, or end, all these projects we’ve started (we quilters call them UFOs).

She notes there are five categories of projects-that-won’t-quit, with “The Indefinite Life Support” being the first. That’s when we keep a project going way past the time it should be allowed to lapse. Think of all those 100 block projects you’ve been seeing all summer. Some actually do go all the way, but I say, if you get to #47 and you’ve learned what you had to learn, and you are ready to move on. . . then don’t feel guilty for not having A Complete Set.

Another category is “The Marathon,” when you carry on a project to the very end, but it burns you out or causes harm. I had two of those this year: the Halloween quilt-a-long, and the Oh Christmas Tree quilt-a-long. I loved doing both of them and have two lovely quilt tops to show for my efforts, but when I got to the part in Oh Christmas Tree where the pattern was wrong, it threw a big wrench into my Enthusiasm Works and I really had to run my own marathon to get that project finished (we corrected it). Doing one quilt-a-long is huge, but two was like running two marathons at once.

She closes her article by noting the good reasons for declaring an end to some things:

Accepting the possibility of the end means periodically taking a critical look at your work and recognizing when its time has passed. Letting go of a project or an organization returns all of the resources it’s tying up — funding, attention, time, the emotional labor contributed by you and others — to the ecosystem. Whether by you or others, those resources will be recombined into new, surprising forms….The end of something, when unrushed and deliberate, is a time for celebration as well as closure.

And so I celebrate the end of the Chuck Nohara project. I still have several blocks to make, and then there is all that sashing, but it feels like a good time to wrap up this portion and move on.

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Chuck Nohara

Chuck Nohara Blocks, and This N’ That

October 4, 2016October 1, 2016 Elizabeth E.8 Comments

It’s Chuck Nohara update time, as I just finished my last block for September. This is how one of them started: a wonky mess. I realized that while I had decided to paper piece this one, not each piece was identical to its brother/sister piece. If you decide to do #CN1723 (which is how we identify them on Instagram), number the pieces from 1-8, so you get neighbors together, rather than mixing them up. Yes, I unpicked it all and started again.

Here are September’s blocks: #cn1723, #cn1105, #cn570, and #cn1454 (links are to IG).

I cheated on the EPP on this one, as I first pieced together the four-patch, then treated it as one unit in the construction.

Here they all are. Now that we are getting closer to the end, I need to think about the shape I want to make. I tend towards square quilts, so if that’s what I want to do, I only need four more. Or eighteen. (Maybe I won’t make it square.)

You know already that I went to Kansas City, but I thought their restored Union Station was stunning, which includes the ornate ceiling and scrubbed-up chandeliers.

The folks in Kansas City are ~~rabid~~ enthusiastic about their sports teams, as I’m sure you can see the Chiefs logo in one of the giant windows.

While I was there I had a chance to sew on a new label for Starry Compass Rose, and it was good to see an old friend again. Not only was my quilt an old friend, so were the people who work at Paintbrush Studios–it was Anne’s birthday and we all went to lunch to celebrate. Yes, we sang to her in the restaurant–she is a lovely person and I was happy my trip coincided with her birthday.

They do food big here; it was delicious (I took home the leftovers). I think there’s a special feeling about the Midwest. You kind of feel like the center of the universe there, with all the trains and planes and people having to go through there, or pass over there on the way to somewhere else. I lived in the Midwest for a couple of years, and still have very fond memories (just not of the snow in the winter).

Lastly, I finished Shine: The Circles Quilt, and have been photographing it in preparation to enter Road to California. I’ll give a big reveal here in a couple of weeks after I finish some more photographs, but for now–it’s done by the deadline.

Now comes the nerve-wracking waiting part.

(I swiped this illustration from Susan’s blog: we are doing this Chuck stuff together.)

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My blogging software puts ads here so I can use their site for free.
I do not know about, nor choose, the content, nor do I receive any money from these ads.
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Quilts

Happy First of September

September 1, 2016September 1, 2016 Elizabeth E.8 Comments

A new month begins with this. . .the list of the Chuck Nohara Blocks to work on.

I finished up Mary‘s block and sent over to her. This 12″ block comes from a free paper-pieced pattern from Amy Friend of During Quiet Time, found *here.* While it took some time, and while I always seem to have to un-stitch (aka, rip out) some pieces because I put the fabric on backwards, it was not difficult.

Our Spelling Bee is coming down the home stretch, with only three more months to go. In August it was also Mary’s turn, and she requested a series of names. I chose Barbara, because that is my daughter’s name, too.

I started cleaning out some of my teaching stuff, since I retired this year. Yep, that life is over with. I even sent in my letter and they are working on transferring my sick leave (which, as an adjunct professor, was always kind of useless) to service hours towards my retirement (which again, as an adjunct professor, I don’t have). But there you go.

I taught a lovely group of women Free Motion Quilting this past Saturday, who boldly jumped into the waters of quilting. It was a great class, shown here holding up their samples.

I found a new recipe for Panzanella, that delicious dish you make with toasted ripped bread, fresh tomatoes and a whole bunch of summer. It’s on my recipe blog *here.* I started keeping my recipes on a blog, as I’m always downstairs and the recipe is upstairs, so now I can have these favorites wherever I go.

This past couple of weeks I worked on my Rosette #6 of the The New Millefiore Hexagon Quilt, which at this point, because we’re a year out, isn’t very new (but that’s the name we’re sticking with), while I was here:

We traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark (that’s Nyhavn you see above) and Stockholm, Sweden. This time, unbelievably, I only went to ONE fabric shop, Stof 2000, in Copenhagen.

And I ate some of their smorrebrod, deliciously stacked sandwiches atop thin slices of rye bread.

Oh, and maybe a little bit of this. I’d send you all some but we’re expected to be nearly 100 degrees today–actually a cooling trend from this week’s Last-Week-Of-August-Weather. And that is another reason why I’m welcoming in September with open arms: it should start to cool down. Happy News. . . Happy September!

Quilts

Summer Bee, Quilting, and Chuck Nohara Updates

August 19, 2016August 12, 2016 Elizabeth E.14 Comments

Updating you on my Chuck Nohara block progress. I finished off the incredibly complicated floral wreath block in the upper left. Susan and I (and Bette) are working together on this, with Susan choosing two/month and me choosing two/month. Yes, I chose that one (never again). But June was finished up.

July’s blocks were interesting. I did the sunglasses on the road to my Gwen Marston class. I did the lower two blocks at the quilting retreat, and promptly had to re-do them again. But I could now cross July’s blocks off the list.

I launched into August early because of some planned travel, and hit my first roadblock with a Dresden-plate block.

I drafted my own little Dresden template, then proceeded the way I always do.

I had prepped up the bird before our road trip to two family reunions, but lost it somewhere between my sewing room and the great state of Utah, so I prepped up a second one, stitching it to completion while watching the Olympics opening ceremony. Yep, I changed a few things, but here they are, all done. I need to get them all up on the design wall, all together. Next week.

My friend, Laurel, showed us her COMPLETED New Hexagon Millefiore Quilt, so I thought I should resurrect that project and get it going again.

So I laid it out on the bed in the extra bedroom. . . (warning–lots of nighttime quilting pictures ahead)

. . . found the package with all the pieces and tried to make sense of it. I ~~hated~~ disliked the strong star shape of that rosette (seen here in Katja’s quilt), so after studying Laurel’s rendition, I made some changes, combining some pieces.

Now comes the fretting part. Will it work in the bluesy-purpley combo I have going?

Luckily I hadn’t cleaned up the stuff of the extra bed yet, and so I laid it out, section by section. I think it will work! I said to my husband, then packed it all away to take traveling with me. It was hard to get going on this, as I’d forgotten how much trial and error is involved in the making of these rosettes.

Here’s three sets of bee blocks for the Mid-Century Modern Bee (top is Mary, middle is for Sherri, and the bottom is for Rene). Can’t wait to see what they do with them!

I did finish Simone’s Spelling Bee Block for July while at the retreat, and it was the one thing I didn’t have to re-do. You’ve seen this before, but since this is a round-up post, I wanted to include it.

I made an extra set of words for Kerry for her Canadian Provinces list of Spelling Bee words. Okay, we are almost to the end (I’ve been saving all this up for a while).

In looking at the looming deadline for Road to California entry, I kept pushing forward on getting this quilt finished.

Which led to many rounds of this on my aching shoulder, and a trip to the doctor’s office. I’ve not stitched much since then, which is like tying my hands behind my back and not letting me use them.

So instead, I read a lot, finding this “Cap Slogan Generator” on the Washington Post website, and thinking that THIS is the slogan we all need to see more of.

And since once an English teacher, always an English teacher, I corrected all the logical fallacies in the questionaire sent to me by one of the major political parties (such errors in faulty reasoning!) and yes, I sent it back to them (they had, after all, provided me with a postage-paid envelope).

I won’t leave you with politics, after all I do have a heart, but instead with this little shot of the shelves above my computer. I’d sent Marsha of #quilterinmotion some of my scraps and as a thank-you, she sent me my first-ever fabric postcard. (I was so excited.)

So, summer’s almost over. Enjoy the last few days of the Olympics, avoid politics, and keep quilting!