Under the Big Top — Janet Szabo

I woke up yesterday intending to attack some cleaning projects, but I get going so early that my day is half over while most people are still drinking their coffee. I did three loads of laundry and cleaned two bathrooms—which included stripping them down and scrubbing everything, including the floors—and thought to myself that it must be past lunchtime. I looked at the clock.

It was 10:03.

Oh, joy! More time to sew. I had to laugh at myself, though.

I think I am ready to talk about the next quilt project. A couple of weeks ago, I was surfing Pinterest when this image popped up in my feed:

The link went to a sales site. This was a vintage quilt that had been sold from that site and was no longer available. A Google image search brought up lots of pretty quilts, but nothing else featuring this pattern. I was able to find the block in Jinny Beyer’s Quilter’s Album of Patchwork Patterns, listed under the nondescript name “Three Patch” and attributed to Alice Brooks, Detroit Free Press, May 20, 1937. It appears on page 311-1 of the book if you want to look at it.

Yes, the pattern is made up of three patches—three oddly-shaped patches obviously cut using templates. I stared at this quilt until I figured out that the pattern could also be made by shifting the area of the block to a different section of the quilt. By doing so, it would allow for rotary cutting and straightforward piecing. The key to the design, though, is the fact that the fabrics making up the half-square triangles in the corners of the original block are the same as one of the fabrics in the circle. Certainly, this could be made in a completely scrappy fashion with no thought as to how the fabrics fall in the finished quilt, but I think that the overall design is more attractive with that controlled fabric placement.

These kinds of patterns appear to be my lot in life, quilting-wise. Noon and Night was much like this. Why do these oddball blocks that have dropped out of favor keep popping up in my path? I love a challenge, but I can see why many designers stick with common blocks.

After some fits and starts with the Drunkard’s Path blocks—and getting a baby quilt out of the research process—I figured out a way to make this design. And it’s more than halfway complete, although I just have units up on the design wall, not completed blocks.

I’ve got the construction figured out as well as (I think) a coherent way to present the pattern that relies on a formula for ensuring that fabrics end up where they are supposed to be. These are all leftover prints from Noon and Night on a background of Kona Snow. I’ve also been able to throw in some darker prints—navy blues and blacks—that I couldn’t use in Noon and Night because of the black background, although some of them, like that navy blue at the bottom, may just be too loud for the design.

So we’ll see. We’ll see where this one ends up. This has been a good mental exercise even if I don’t publish a pattern for it, and a finished quilt is always a bonus. And because this reminds me of a circus tent for some reason, the name of this one is Under the Big Top. That’s a bit more descriptive than “Three Patch,” don’t you think?

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I’m going to wait until later in the week to run errands as tomorrow is a holiday. I plan to spend the day finishing up the patten for Noon and Night, getting the pattern for Cobbles to a point where it can be tested and edited, and changing a few things on the website.

As much as I appreciated the speed with which the tech editor got Noon and Night edited and sent back to me, I don’t think I’m going to work with her in the future. Don’t get me wrong—she’s very good. I just don’t think that she’s a good fit as an editor for me. That is no one’s fault; it’s simply an acknowledgement that people have different philosophies. JC Briar and I had such a good working relationship for more than 10 years when she edited my knitting patterns that I am a bit spoiled. I am committed to having other sets of eyes on my patterns—and having my block instructions tested in real life, as I did for Noon and Night—but that process is going to look a bit different behind the scenes going forward.

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It looks like we’ll be out of this deep freeze soon, but the storm train keeps rolling on. DD#2 called yesterday to let us know that she hadn’t gone into work—she has snow tires on her car and knows how to drive in lousy conditions, but the road crews in Seattle just aren’t used to big snow events and were having trouble keeping the roads clear. I follow the WA DOT in my Twitter feed and got to see pictures from a 15-car pileup on I-90 at the bottom of Snoqualmie Pass in an area I’ve driven by dozens of times. (Sometimes it doesn’t matter how good a driver you are if the other people on the road don’t know what they’re doing.) I think we are supposed to get more snow this week. February is half over. I’ll need to start seeds in just another month or so.