Tag: WIP

WIP

English Paper Piecing, continued

Elizabeth E.6 Comments

I’m leading with the same photo I did yesterday, the very first English Paper Piecing Block (EPP) I’ve ever done.

But here’s the beginning of my work in progress: block two, all looking like a set of green and blue flower petals, waiting to be joined into a rosette-like flower.  It has  a different background border.

Block Three is in progress, as I cut my fabric full of swiss-cheese-like holes.

And it’s only as I begin to work on Block Four that I’m beginning to see that it’s really no use to get too much of a blender series of kite shapes there at the outer edges.  Otherwise you might as well cut a giant triangle and piece into place.  What makes this form of patchwork beguiling is the ability to incorporate different fabrics to get a mosaicky look to it, like it’s a kaleidoscope or tumbling pieces of glass.

I realize that some of it is the fabric I’ve chosen.  If I’d gone more the color route, drawing different colors form here and there and making them into a rose, I wouldn’t have had to worry so much about getting too much blending.  Typical of me to think of a hard way to do something easy and beautiful.  But I like this challenge, and how the project is teaching me as I work through it.   And in searching for different darker borders, I found two one-yard pieces of this fabric, but I don’t know how many more flowers I want to make.  The first took me about two weeks of TV and conversation time; it measures over 17″ from point to point.  Jumbo.  That small center hexagon on the desk is out there to remind me of Block Two as I work on 3 & 4, as Block Two is usually tucked away in the basket downstairs, waiting for conversation with my husband.

Or  a good show–like the Academy Awards, which is coming up this Sunday. (Go *here* to How About Orange to download the Oscar Bingo cards and Ballots. Her photo, above, is used with permission.)

What else on this WIP Wednesday?  Finishing up the label for the red/white quilt I’ve been working on.  Which is less than wonderful (more on that on Friday), but I love love the quilting.  So isn’t that how it goes?  Sometimes you love the whole of something, and other times you only love parts of it.  Just like toddlers.  Or teenagers.  Or teaching.  Or just like life.

Many thanks to Lee of Freshly Pieced Fabrics for hosting WIP Wednesday.

Head back over there to see other works in progress.

Quilts · WIP

Valentine Quilt

Elizabeth E.10 Comments

More Road to California is coming–just had a lot of lesson prep to do–plus this little detour.

This is a WIP post–Work In Progress post–hosted by Lee of Freshly Pieced Fabrics.  Since having my heck-of-a-December, these weekly deadlines have been quite a blessing for me.  They give me a goal to have my hands on the cloth at least once a week.  Many thanks, Lee!

But this afternoon/evening I stole away from the computer for a few minutes to start on a Valentine Quilt (Let’s hope it doesn’t turn into a Forth of July quilt!).  It all started when Rhonda sent me a photo of a quilt she was doing for a class for Mare’s Bears–a local quilt shop near Alexandria, Virginia, where I used to live.

I fell in love with it–so fun and fresh and so red-and-white.  We talked on the phone and she told me her inspiration was Le Jardin Cerise, in a recent McCall’s magazine.  I looked up that quilt and to me, they looked very dissimilar.  The original was a blender quilt, with more emphasis on color, whereas Rhonda’s had an emphasis on value–the light-to-dark of a quilt.  She gives credit to the magazine for the pattern, but I give credit to Rhonda for making it sing for me!

So I opened the “red” cupboard. . .

. . . and picked a swath of reds.

Maybe I had red and white on the brain, having shopped at Sandy Klop’s booth at Road to California, where they gave me this very cute bag.  (See our photo with her below).

And maybe because Cindy and I (on the right) were all decked out in reddish tones.  And maybe because all the stores have put away their Christmas and gone straight to Valentine’s Day.  But I think it’s more because of Rhonda’s amazing skills.

Beginning, I cut red squares, until I remembered that Rhonda said she’d done a more streamlined way of putting it together, sewing the thin strips onto the larger.

Okay.  Back on track.  Then I bordered them with strips on which I’d placed a square, then stitched diagonally to make a triangle.

So here are my first four blocks, with the little pinwheel in the center.  Mine’s much more unkempt than Rhonda’s, because I drew from my stash, while she limited herself to six fabrics.  Of course, I like hers better (I always do), but mine will work.  I have to teach in the morning, but look forward to getting back to this tomorrow afternoon, raiding my stash for reds to make it work.

UPDATE: Pattern links no longer work, so I drew up some loose instructions and have it for you at its new home: Revisiting the Red & White Pinwheel.

WIP

I Am A Work in Progress

Elizabeth E.5 Comments

I hardly know how to pick up a rotary cutter, let alone sew a seam, and find the new thing that I am capable of creating.

I am a work in progress this year.

I just had cancer surgery, a sure-fire way to whack me upside the head and force a look at the musty, over-stuffed closet of a life I’d been leading.  Too much shoved in, with the door slammed shut. A veritable chifforobe of clutter.

I had a birthday–Happy #58 to me, and also to Krista, my microbiologist blog-buddy (although I don’t know how old she is).

While trying to locate the surface of my ironing board today, I found detritus from two recent trips: Montreal in October and New York City in November.

I fell in love with Julia Ritson’s blog, a habit I could indulge while haunting my bed while in recovery, and especially this recent collage she made of a city (I asked for permission to post it here).  I think I could never make something this intriguing with hidden layers, ideas, textures.  I sometimes feel like I’ll never make anything else again. When I feel like this, it’s just empty inside.

My mother consoles me by saying it’s an after-effect of anesthesia (yet I’m ready to be back who I was).  I can feel the pull to colors, shapes, cutting, cloth, but resist.  It takes too much energy, and there was that syllabus I had to write.  Luckily my husband gave me Ringle and Kerr’s latest quilt book, so I consoled myself with their transparency brilliance.

I’m a crazy quilt, a wonky log cabin, a beginner’s Shoo-fly block with points cut off.

Talking exhausts me.

Writing feeds me, but I don’t spend enough time doing that because I’m talking.

A day of quiet restores me.  I hope this quirk doesn’t persist much longer because most everyone I love lives at the other end of the phone line, and talking is the only way we have to keep in touch.

I haven’t bought this year’s diary and my days are slipping away.  I didn’t realize it was Wednesday until I saw Cindy’s post about her fabulous quilt.  (Can I use her Work in Progress for Lee’s blog?  Didn’t think so.)

I’m in pretty good spirits today as I went to Target for a shower cap, Michael’s for medium treat bags, and Costco for dinner rolls.  They didn’t have the rolls done yet (“40 more minutes”) and I suddenly realized that I was crashing into a wall of tired, so pushed my empty cart back out into the parking lot, drove home and took a nap.  Even though I feel like a pathetic dishrag at times, I am making progress in recovery not only from the cancer blippiness but also from the bronchitis and double ear infections.  “Sick, sick no more” should be a slogan on my T-shirt.

I’m a riddle, a collection of wishes, a basket of fears, and a quilt without her borders.

Things I’m Working On (Quilt-wise):
(I would have photos, but the camera batteries died.  In all three cameras.)
Getting the borders on the autumn quilt
Deciding whether or not to take all the Christmas quilt squares off the wall, or to try to sew them up.
Figuring out how I want to spend my Fat Quarter gift card from my son
Lollypop Trees
Friendship Quilt

Getting the stitches out of ME–this Friday.  The margins are clear.  All is well.  Now to find the brain cells.

And that beginner’s block?  It was my mother’s, when she was a girl and it’s about 75 years old.  It’s one of my treasures.

Many thanks to Lee, who threw me this lifeline of a deadline today.  Check out her lovely bee block!

Books · Quilts · Sewing

Quilting Organically

Elizabeth E.2 Comments

Not quilting with organic fabric.  I was thinking more along the lines of a quilt that just sort of evolves from one stage to the next, getting stalled, then moving forward again.  But Quilting Evolutionarily (is that a word?) just sounded like it was heading somewhere different.  Often I feel the pressure to rush things–you know, to Get-It-Done so I can have something to show off to everyone in the blogosphere.  Because why would anyone want to read about my humdrum, inch-by-inch progress in my projects?  Only because that’s probably how things are going for many of us, especially at the holidays, when we are pulled too many directions.

So, after I put the blue borders on my wonky log cabin, it sat.  Then after finishing the grading, the finals, I actually had a night when I was waiting for my husband to come home from a trip back East, and I wanted to stay up and I had a good novel going, so I was ready to sew.

Forgive the blurry picture–it was at night.  I sewed white strips onto the blue borders.  I also had a stack of “middles” without the blue borders (I’d run out of fabric).  I added red strips to those, and then green.

And then I alternated them up on the pinwall. And there they’ve been for a few days now, while I try to figure out the next step.  They are all different sizes, so I’m trying to decide which ones to cut down, and to which ones I should add a deep blue strip or two in order to get them to become roughly the same size.

The novel I’m listening to is Moon Over Manifest and it’s written for a bit younger crowd; I’m still really enjoying it as it combines two periods of history in the story of the twelve-year-old protagonist.  I’m considering it for my English class next semester: since the main character is 12, I don’t have to worry about inappropriate romantic entanglements that I’d have to deal with in class discussions.  I’m teaching a developmental class (one below Freshman Comp) so this level might be appropriate to most of their reading skills.

So, not that anyone’s reading with a week left until Christmas, and Hanukkah just beginning, and the general rush rush of buying gifts and decorating and baking, but I am making progress on this quilt.  It’s interesting to sew without a plan.  I’m sewing just for the pleasure of it, just to discover what will unfold — the kind of sewing I need right now.