Criss-Cross – Page 2 – OccasionalPiece

Krista sent me these too close to Christmas to post (and besides, no one was reading any blogs that week anyway), so here they are on the New Year, now that we’ve all put away our decorations, celebrated, vacuumed and have actually resumed some sense of order in our lives. Or at least pretend we have.

We are in the (I can never get this right) the Plus and X Friendship Swap. Or the X and Plus Swap. I just call it the Cross-X swap, as noted in the title, and all our blocks — thus far swapped — are on my pinwall, above. Cool, huh?

As of this post, she is all caught up, but I’m now 4 blocks behind for January. I can just hear her saying “Neener, neener, neener!” I’ll catch up, Krista, I promise. I notice that usually we try to make the background all the same, but in her blocks sent for January, she’s varied the backgrounds. I’m trying to decide if I like her new twist, but she’s very creative and a really wonderful swap partner, so I need to be open to new ideas. We try to blog the last Fridays of each month and hey–it’s only the 10th, and I need to get out several blocks promised for a cooperative group quilt, two bee blocks, and I’m working really hard on my Amish With A Twist-2 quilt, too.

Quilt Frolic has a new home. During Christmastime, all our children and grandchildren came home, and my youngest, Peter, and his wife, Megan, stayed with us the entire week while waves of family moved in and out of the two other available rooms.

I had this quilt on their bed, and one morning Megan was relating a conversation she had with Peter about how much she like this quilt. “I mean, I really like it,” she said. And she asked my son if she thought she could, like, borrow it, or even have it.

Megan, that is music to a quilter’s ears! I gave it to her on the spot. I was thrilled that she liked it well enough to want it, and I think she was thrilled to take it home. Megan really liked the fabrics in it–a combo of Amy Butler and some Anna Maria Horner–a kind of fabric that suits Megan well. She did get it into her teensy little carryon for the trip across the United States, to their home on the East Coast.

I am glad that this quilt has gone to someone who loves it!

In my last post I talked about Zombie Quilt Night. Well, at least that’s how I felt.

So, in exploring my really overwhelming list of blogs in my Google Reader, I began to see this block appear:

and

These two are made by a quilter in London, and these photos are from her blog. I found the Flikr pool if you want to see some more. I like these blocks because it’s obvious you can use scraps and whatever, so long as you use a bland background and differentiate the cross fabrics from the X fabrics. The blocks together look like this:

and

These are from Stawberrylicious’ photo stream, but couldn’t locate her blog (I admit to being ~~dumb~~ untutored about Flikr, yessirree). It’s nice to feel some enthusiasm for a new idea–that always gets my hands into the fabric. There’s lots of potential for novelty fabrics and word fabrics, and cool prints.

(Update: I found her blog. You have to be invited to view it.)

This interest in an old block by Nancy Cabot was apparently generated by Setsuko Inagawa’s quilt:

Somebody with a blog named Badskirt has developed a tutorial for this, and although the pictures are spot on, I am doing some wondering about the measurements. See below.

I kept looking at the blocks on Flikr and noticed that the angled wedge didn’t always line up properly into the cross in the middle. I drew it up on my quilt program:

I realized part of the trouble many of the blocks I found on the web seemed to be a 7″ block. But this is a five-segmented block, so the measurements are more true if they are done in units of five: 5″ block, 7.5,” 10″ block etc. So, I checked her measurements–they are fine–so what I saw constructed may have been others not being careful, or using incorrect measurements.

For a 10″ block, the templates (with seam allowances included) look like this, with that long center strip 2.5″ x 6.5″, the square measuring 4.5″ and the other small blocks 2.5.” My program prints out the snowball blocks as two triangles, which I cut out and tape together to get the measurement. Or–just just cut squares 2.5.” I’ll probably stick with the 7 1/2-inch blocks because I like the repetition of the small blocks.

I wonder if anyone else is like me–that even when you’re working on a project, you need a spark now and again to keep interest. I heard an interview with Andrew Zuckerman on Swiss Miss’ Creative Mornings series and he said “I hate every project three months in. I’m exhausted. I’m questioning whether it’s any good. I’m unhappy. [But] that’s just the process. You have to get through that. You have to commit. . . there’s no pulling out–it has to work. And then it works out, because of the commitment. There’s always failure when you don’t see it through fully.”

Just knowing I have Cross and X block possibilities in the back of my mind, will help me get through the Lollypop Trees process. I hope.