Another Quilt Top to Add to the Pile

I finished the green and purple quilt top yesterday morning while I waited for it to warm up enough for me to work outside:

I think I am going to have to take off that outer border and reattach it—despite measuring carefully through the center of the quilt, despite cutting the border on the lengthwise grain of the fabric, and despite using my walking foot to attach it, the border is ruffling. I may have to switch back to piecing on my Necchi. I was using the Janome just because it was set up for piecing and had the right color thread in it. For now, though, the top has been folded carefully and added to the pile. I’ll revisit it in a couple of days.

I also made the mistake of playing with BlockBase+ for a bit and now I’ve got an idea for another quilt. I knew that was going to happen.

I’ve noticed that many of the really productive quilt designers out there—the ones with patterns AND blogs AND YouTube channels AND Instagram feeds, etc.—have enlisted younger-generation family members in their businesses. I should have had more kids, LOL.

****************************************************

I actually had to open the greenhouse doors for a while yesterday as it was so warm inside. I chatted with our renter and his 4 year-old daughter on my way over to the garden, and she informed me that they had caught a wolf spider in the house and relocated it to the greenhouse, and if I saw it, I was to address it as “Olivia.” I thanked them for moving the spider and not killing it. I don’t mind spiders (or snakes) in the greenhouse.

The fruit trees need to be pruned. That was on my list for the afternoon. A couple of the apple trees had to have some lower branches removed. I should have done that last year but didn’t. That’s done now, and when the rest of the snow melts, I can get to the other trees.

It felt good to be out in the sunshine. This nice weather may be a Mother Nature head-fake, though—I’ve lived here long enough to know that we could still get snow in June.

The husband spent the day chasing down a problem on the forklift, which inexplicably has been shutting itself off while it’s running. He uses that machine a lot, so having it operational is a priority.

****************************************************

This little wooden box sums up much of what I’ve been struggling with for the past couple of weeks:

At the beginning of February, we got a freight shipment of stuff from my in-laws’ house in Maryland. It was freighted here because there were some large paintings done by my MIL and by her mother that are going to the girls, but the shipment also included boxes of some other items. My father-in-law moved to assisted living just before Christmas. His daughters spent several weeks in Maryland cleaning out the house. Thankfully, neither of my in-laws were pack rats—not even close—but there were still items that needed to be dealt with.

I’ve been going through the boxes one by one. There are photos. There are slides. There are CDs with backups of all the photos on my MIL’s computer. And there was this little wooden box. I opened it, expecting to find recipes. What I found were index cards with all the names and varieties of all the azaleas that the husband’s grandmother had planted at her house in Pennsylvania.

I said to him, “What do I do with this?” Those of us who spent time at that house remember how beautiful the azaleas were. My MIL had moved some of them to her house in Maryland and no doubt kept this box of cards so she would have the information. We like being able to see Grandma Milly’s handwriting. But none of this really has value beyond the sentimental.

I do not want to leave a mountain—or even a hill—of stuff for my children to deal with after I am gone. Even the sentimental value of some of these items diminishes as we get further from previous generations.

I could figure out creative things to do with these cards. I could scan them. I could frame a couple. But all of that takes time, and doing so is not really a priority for me right now. So I ponder what to do with this box.

But Not There Yet

I’ve been in an absolute funk this week. March is such a difficult month here. It’s spring and it’s not spring. We’ve had lovely, sunny weather, but I can’t get outside to work yet. I have had no desire to machine quilt, so Big Top is still sitting, half-finished, on the table with the Q20. I spent Wednesday morning and yesterday morning cleaning the upstairs. We have so much dust here—our road wasn’t paved for the first few years after we built our house, and we’ve had a lot of ash drift in from wildfires over the past couple of summers. We don’t have A/C and have to keep the windows open when it’s hot. The result is that a thick layer of dust accumulates. Every so often, I have to take whole rooms apart, wipe down everything with a damp rag, and vacuum thoroughly. Swiffer dusters are no match for this kind and amount of dust—they just stir it up and let it resettle. I’d love to have one of those houses where I could keep quilts out on display, but the dust makes that impossible.

As I go, I’m also trying to make piles of items to donate. We just don’t need all this stuff.

I have been sewing in the afternoons. All of the green and purple star blocks for the lilac quilt (for lack of a better name) are done, and last night, I made all of the four-patches for the chain blocks (they are white and dark purple).

I decreased the number of star blocks to 13 to make the design balance. Even so, without borders, the top is a respectable 60” x 60”. I’ll look for some suitable border fabric(s) on my next trip to town.

The chain blocks shouldn’t take to long to finish. This top may be done and basted before too long. It’s pretty even though it’s not my style, and it’s just what I envisioned when I was searching for flowers a few weeks ago.

I need to get a handle on things and prioritize what I am going to work on. I hate having half-finished projects of any kind, and I certainly shouldn’t start anything else. Being so mentally unfocused is psychologically uncomfortable. It doesn’t happen very often, but it’s frustrating when it does. I prefer to attack my schedule with laser-like focus, LOL.

Of course, this was released yesterday (and it’s currently 25% off if you’re interested):

BlockBase+ is a standalone database program with over 4000 quilt block designs researched and compiled by Barbara Brackman. It is put out by the same people that bring you Electric Quilt 8, although EQ is not required to use BlockBase+. I haven’t done a deep dive yet, but I did check to see if Noon and Night is included (it’s not) and what the Beginner’s Choice block looks like (it’s the same as the one in the Jinny Beyer book). I’ve been waiting months for this, although I have no business mucking around in it right now, because that will release an avalanche of quilt ideas that I’ll want to play with. Bleh.

Inching Toward Spring

I went to my Ruler of the Month class yesterday afternoon. The instructor demonstrated how to use the ruler on both the longarm machine (a HandiQuilter model) and the sitdown Q20. It’s interesting to see the differences; on a longarm, the machine is moving and the ruler is stationary, and on the Q20, the quilt and ruler are moving and the machine is stationary. This month’s ruler is an on-point square. (The store ran short on their supply so I’ll get mine later this week.) I’m already thinking of ways to use it in the border of the Big Top quilt. That quilt is still on my Q20 and I need to finish quilting it.

I don’t think I’ll become a ruler fanatic, but I would like to get to some basic level of competence with them.

The store had also received a shipment from Bernina and had my extra bobbin case and package of bobbins. I bought an extra bobbin case so I could play around with heavier thread on the bottom without having to continually adjust my original bobbin case. I get 20% off all Bernina accessories because I bought my Q20 at the store, so that’s a nice benefit.

I took my Sandhill Sling in to the other quilt store to show it off—the ladies who work there make a lot of bags and the store also carries Noodlehead patterns. They asked me to bring it in so they could see it. And of course, I stopped in at Joann Fabrics and raided the remnant rack.

The green and purple star blocks are in the assembly stage. It takes me about 20 minutes to do one block:

I don’t want to get too many tops done and not be able to get them quilted and written up. I’m trying to work on writing up the Big Top pattern before I forget what I did. I took notes and made drawings, but I want that pattern out of my head before those notes cease to make sense. The pattern for Cobbles and Pebbles is almost done and ready to list in the store.

I am trying not to make too many assumptions about my schedule. I have a rough idea of how things may go, because winter and summer are so drastically different in terms of daily tasks, but nothing about the last couple of years has been consistent. In the spring of 2019, I was working from 5-noon as a transcriptionist and managing gardening and animals in the afternoons. Last spring, my transcriptionist job went from full-time to part-time and eventually disappeared altogether, and we were in the midst of a pandemic. I may have more time this spring than I anticipate and can keep working on quilt projects.

The farm store put out their chick schedule so I grabbed one yesterday. We’re aiming to get chicks the last week of March or first week of April. It looks like they’ve ordered from additional hatcheries, so the supply should be adequate. This year, we need white or black pullets. (I do a different color breed every year so we know what ages they are.) I’ve got it narrowed down to Black Star, Black Australorp (we’ve had those before), Black Jersey Giant, White Plymouth Rock, White Orpington, and Pearl White Leghorn. We had Leghorns once and I said never again because they were so flighty. For egg production, though, they cannot be beat, so I would be willing to consider them. Some of what I get depends on what the store has when I go in.

The store is also getting in 25 Blue Australorp pullets the week of April 19. I am not much for rare or designer chicken breeds—and especially not at $10 apiece—but I would get one or two if they don’t sell out.

Decisions, decisions. I am glad I have all my seeds and don’t need to worry about them. And it occurred to me that I am going to have to prune fruit trees in another week or two.

The Collars Are Moving

The bear biologist for Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks posted on social media this week that “the collars are moving.” I thought that was such a descriptive way to let people know that the bears are waking up and coming out of their dens. We haven’t seen any signs, but we’ll be watching (and making sure the electric fence is on around the chicken coop). I haven’t seen any robins yet, either, although I’ve heard the pileated woodpecker. Spring is coming.

DD#1 and DSIL made it to Ketchikan. The ferry arrived around 4 pm Sunday afternoon and they were at their house a few hours later. They are renting a house from a friend of DSIL’s family. It’s right on the water in a small bay and I’m sure that it feels like a palace after living in a closet in Seattle for three years. (Their apartment in Seattle was about the size of our living room.) DSIL had his first day at work yesterday and DD#1 is busy getting the house organized. She’ll look for a job once things are settled. I said to the husband that I am a bit envious of their big adventure and he asked me if I wanted to move to Alaska. I don’t, but I remember the excitement of moving out here to Montana.

Clearly, it is time for a road trip.

The big brown truck of happiness delivered these racks to me yesterday:

Accuquilt has a weekly Facebook live broadcast—I usually watch it on YouTube after the fact—that includes some screaming deal on their website. Last week, it was “buy one, get one 50% off” on accessories. I wanted racks for my big dies and they were finally back in stock, so I ordered two. The dies have to be stored upright so as not to damage the blades. I had them leaning against the closet door but kept stubbing my toe on them. This is a much better solution.

These dies continue to pay for themselves in time savings, especially in situations like this:

I need 15 star blocks for this quilt. Each block has eight of those green and white HSTs, or 120 total. I made them by cutting 60 white and 60 green 3” blocks, sewing them together on the diagonal, then cutting them in half and trimming to 2-1/2”. I am pretty speedy with the rotary cutter, but it was SO much faster to cut the piece of fabric I needed, lay it on the die, and cut all those 3” squares in one pass, perfectly sized. (If I had the triangle dies, I could cut triangles and chain piece them into HSTs, but the squares work fine for me.)

As soon as I get these star blocks put together, I’ll start working on the chain blocks.

And finally, I recommend this excellent piece entitled Come and Take It: Part One of a Series on Practical Wisdom, by Spencer Klavan, a young man I follow on Twitter. We’ve somehow lost the capacity to have these kinds of philosophically-minded discussions with each other, as it’s far easier just to default to calling anyone we disagree with a Nazi. (I saw that happen again on Facebook this week, sadly.)

Junior Quilter

I had WS for the day yesterday while his mom was at a class. She dropped him off a little after 7:00. He is not a morning person, so I let him hang out in the husband’s recliner and watch PBS Kids for a while. Eventually, he ate breakfast and then wanted to do a project. I asked him what he had in mind and he said he wanted to make a blanket for his cat.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Asking WS about his ideas can be tricky. The possibility was not small that the answer to my question might have been, “Can we build a zip line from the top of the shop?” and would have been accompanied by specific plans and instructions. A blanket I can manage; a zip line is a different matter altogether.

We went upstairs to look for fabric. I had some scraps of cat-themed cotton, so we started with that. He added squares of green and orange and then we did the math. The advantage to having a mom with a degree in childhood education is that he is way beyond his grade level in a lot of subjects. He’s also done some sewing with her so this was not unfamiliar territory. He determined how big he wanted to make the blanket and how many squares of what size he needed. I pressed the fabric and showed him how to use the ruler and rotary cutter. No bandaids were required.

My Janome has adjustable speed settings, so I sat him down at that machine and set it to slow. I put the foot pedal up on a box, and pointed out the buttons for needle up/down, reverse, and the automatic thread cutter. (He was fascinated by that thread cutter.) The quarter-inch foot with the side blade was already on the machine. I explained that he needed to keep the edge of the fabric along that blade, then let him loose. He sewed all of the blocks together and we only had to take out one slightly wonky seam.

He did all of the pressing. Once the front was together, I found a batting scrap and some yellow polka dot for the backing. Rather than bind it, I decided it would be easiest to sew everything together and turn it inside out. I did that part for him, and then topstitched around the outside edge.

He picked out some green and yellow variegated #8 thread from my embroidery supplies. I demonstrated how to pull the thread through the layers and he did all the squares and tied the knots (very securely, so the cat cannot take them out and eat the thread).

And now the cat has a blanket!

He also wanted to make a pincushion, so I put some 5” squares together for him to sew. He stuffed it with a bunch of Poly-Fil and I sewed it shut.

Making those projects used up most of the morning. After lunch, we headed outside to see what the husband was up to (loading a trailer). We checked out the rebuilt Porta-Potty/outhouse—WS noted that the husband had paid particular attention to the interior details, like putting in screened ventilation holes and a shelf for the supplies.

We gave scratch grains to the chickens and collected eggs. Elysian also has chickens, so WS is right at home in the coop, although my hens don’t like it when he tries to sneak eggs out from underneath them. I have a few who look like they might go broody—if only—and they get snippy when you get too close. We left them alone. WS informed me that, in his opinion, I “pamper” my chickens. LOL.

We went over to the greenhouse to see what needed to be done there, which is not much because the greenhouse fairy had already paid a visit and organized everything. (I suspect the husband did that last fall when he was putting all the gardening tools away.) I need to shell the rest of the beans that have been drying out there, but everything is all set up for starting seeds in a few weeks.

I suggested we walk out and take a look at the garden. There is still about 6” of slushy snow on the ground (this is looking east, back toward the mountains):

But we also discovered this:

This must have come down in the last windstorm. It fell from the pig pasture onto the fence separating the garden and pasture. There was another tree down in the pig pasture, so the husband will have to get out there with the chainsaw and also shore up this section of fence. The tomato cages don’t appear to have taken much damage.

Elysian’s class ended around 6:00 p.m. (a long day for her). By that time, WS had gotten his second wind and wanted to make a zipper pouch—he already had the dimensions worked out—but I told him he would have to come back another day to do that.

***************************************************************

DD#1 and DSIL should be arriving in Ketchikan this evening. Their ferry left about 14 hours later than scheduled because of a storm system and high winds. We are looking forward to hearing about how they are settling in to their new home. DD#2 starts her new job on March 22nd. I’ve got a laundry list of things to take care of this week and that may or may not include sewing. We’ll have to see.

A Completed Sandhill Sling!

I’ve started whittling away at the spring cleaning, sorting and making piles to donate. I’m trying to do an hour of sorting every morning. I still have two little Guidepost kids’ sweaters to sew together from the ones my MIL started and then I’ll package those up—there are about a dozen—and send them off. I plan to hike out to the greenhouse this afternoon and assess what needs to be done out there. We’ve had a week of warm temperatures that have melted quite a bit of snow. It’s too early to work outside, but it will be time to plant seeds soon. And I expect we’ll have chicks by the end of March. The farm store seems to have a good supply this year, so I’ll just get them there.

I got my Sandhill Sling done yesterday!

This came together quickly and easily. I was able to watch all of the videos, even though the sewalong is still in progress, as the links are embedded in the pattern. After some consideration, I decided to sew the lining in on the machine. Anna notes that it’s a bit easier with a free arm, but she doesn’t have one on her machine.

[Honestly, the only time I ever use the free arm on any of my machines is on the coverstitch for doing the hems on the sleeves of knit tops. I am so used to sewing on flatbed machines that I hardly think about it anymore.]

She also suggests basting in the lining before sewing. That does make a difference. I was able to move the bag through the machine—my industrial Necchi—without worrying about the lining shifting out of place. What makes this step so tricky is having to topstitch along the side of the zipper, down the side of the bag and around the base of the zipper, back up and along the other side of the zipper and down around the base on that side, then back up. This is not a large bag, so it’s a bit of a tight fit under the needle. I was happy with the way the topstitching looked when I was done, though. Having that machine in a treadle base makes it perfect for projects like this where I need to sew slowly.

The lining is hard to see because it’s a dark color, but it fits snugly down inside the bag.

Overall, this was a fun project—as are all of Anna’s designs. And I learned a few new techniques that I think will come in handy on the Slabtown Backpack.

I need to add some kind of extended zipper pulls, especially on that zipper on the side pocket. I used Coats and Clark purse zippers from Joanns because they were in my stash, but I don’t like them as well as the byAnnie or YKK zippers. The zipper tabs taper down and have too small a hole to install a leather pull. I’ll have to clip on some kind of charm or something.

*******************************************************

I have one more round of edits on the Cobbles pattern and then my tech editor will give it a final review. I am so happy to have found someone I enjoy working with. Tera has also weighed in with some good comments. I’m hoping to have that one listed in the store soon, and then I can start working on Big Top and Beginner’s Choice (which is going to need a different name).

A Tower of Fabric

My fat quarter bundle of Corey Yoder’s Spring Brook line arrived in the mail yesterday:

This is about three times the size of the fat quarter bundle I had for her Pepper and Flax line. I am sure that there will be enough left over after I finish the original quilt to make a second one.

I’ve signed up for the Ruler of the Month club at the quilt store where I bought the Q20. The club is a HandiQuilter program (that’s the other line of machines they carry), but the rulers can be used on both machines. The first class is next Tuesday and I’m looking forward to learning more about rulers and ideas for using them. The Amanda Murphy book and videos have been great resources, but I also like hands-on instruction. The class runs for six months. Each month we get a different ruler, which more than pays for the cost of the classes.

I’m doing something I don’t usually do when I make quilts:

I am cutting all the fabric at once. I’m not designing this one on the fly or using up scraps as I go, so it’s much easier to do a marathon cutting session for each unit, then stack the units up in blocks. I’ll make all of the star blocks, first, then cut the fabric and make the chain blocks. As the design stands right now, it’s 60” x 72” without borders.

That quilt block I designed may have to go into timeout for a bit. I love the block. I love the quilt design I came up with for it, too. The problem is that when I look at the block/quilt design, I see something very specific, and the Very Specific Thing is wreaking havoc with the fabric choices. I much prefer blocks that can be interpreted and used in many different ways. I picked up some fat quarters at the quilt store and I am going to make a few more test blocks in an attempt to come up with something coherent.

Some days I am in charge and some days the quilts are in charge.

On a related note, if I can ever figure out which shade of dark blue Kona doesn’t have a greenish cast to it, I am going to buy an entire bolt. I like navy blue as a background color, but it’s a tricky one to dye, I think.

**************************************************************

There is a joke in ministerial circles that pastors only have one sermon, and they preach a variation of that same sermon every Sunday. I plead guilty to the same here on the blog. Homesteading/being prepared is something I am passionate about, so I talk about it a lot. It goes without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that if you don’t like the content here, you’re welcome to go elsewhere. No one is forcing you to read what I write.

I ran across the following post yesterday morning on a quilt group I belong to. There was a picture accompanying it, but the text gets the point across very well.

During the Texas February freeze (3 days of rolling electric blackouts) and then our subsequent 10 days of going without water, I managed to finish 2 dozen baby quilts for the Binky Patrol. I could piece them on my 1952 Singer 66 treadle (no electric needed) and then when the electric rolled back on, I could quilt them on my 1970 Kenmore. Tomorrow I deliver them to the local group's distributors. It was a good way to keep busy and to keep warm. There are 4 bundles of 6 here, tied up with the trimmed salvages from the fabrics. Nothing wasted.

Here’s a woman who turned a lousy situation into something positive. And before someone misses the point—deliberately or otherwise—and tells me that “not everyone has a treadle sewing machine and can do this”—the point I am making here is that the details of the situation don’t matter. The solution doesn’t matter. This post just happened to involve quilts. What matters is flipping one’s mindset from “This is a disaster, I can’t do anything!” to “This is a disaster, I can do something!” No, not everyone will be in a position to set aside their own issues and discomforts, but this woman could and did, and what she accomplished in that period of time is impressive.

Big Top Quilting Progress

“Quilting” is a term that encompasses many different activities. Strictly speaking, though, “quilting” is the process of joining layers of fabric together with needle and thread, either by hand or machine. Hand quilting is very different from machine quilting. Machine quilting really is its own art form. I’ve noted before that I prefer the design and piecing part of making quilts over the actual quilting—either by hand or machine. However, I don’t want a closet full of unquilted tops, so I am forcing myself to get better at machine quilting. As Angela Walters says, “Every master was once a disaster.” I am nowhere near master, but I think I have progressed at least a bit beyond disaster.

I’ve been struggling with how to quilt the Big Top quilt. I can see the appeal of having a longarm machine on a frame, hooked up to a computer, making an edge-to-edge design on a quilt. That setup takes a lot of agonizing out of the equation. As my Q20 isn’t on a frame (or hooked up to a computer), my version of that system is to quilt meandering loops. I am good at them and they don’t take much time. They aren’t appropriate for every situation, though. Sometimes a quilt design can be enhanced by custom quilting, or quilting different sections of the top in different ways.

Amanda Murphy likes to approach a custom design by quilting “the bones” of the design first, then going back and filling in specific areas. I first looked at the photo of the vintage quilt that inspired my version:

I see the strong vertical and horizontal lines that come from the shape of the block. I changed my piecing, though, to avoid those oddly-shaped wedges, so I don’t have that same kind of underlying grid.

It does look as though the top has hand quilted lines just inside and outside each unit, so that’s where I started:

I used rulers to quilt inside each of the background sections. I am also going to quilt inside each quadrant of the circles. (This is starting to resemble the quilting, actually, on Noon and Night, where I did much the same kind of outlining.) I’m going to do that much and then reassess. I am not a fan of dense quilting, but there has to be enough quilting to keep the batting from bunching up. I might have to add something in these background areas.

These aren’t show quilts. At this point, I am machine quilting my tops with two objectives in mind: 1) to get better at it; and 2) to finish the tops so I can publish the patterns. That’s it. And in the process, I am getting to know the Q20 better and what it likes.

*****************************************************

I went ahead and started cutting the purple and green fabrics to make a quilt from that block that everyone liked. Even if it’s not my style, it’s a pretty block and I think it will make a pretty quilt. It’s good to get out of one’s comfort zone. I also want to make a quilt with the block I designed, but I am still considering fabric choices for that one.

*****************************************************

We are celebrating DD#2’s promotion to a new position with Nordstrom. Instead of being an assistant manager in a store, she will be working from home as a merchandise analyst. I have always been impressed with Nordstrom’s policy of promoting from within. They also like to cross-train their employees in several different areas. DD#2 did an internship with Nordstrom in college and worked at the store in Spokane before moving to Seattle to work at a store there.

I’m sure someone will take offense at this, as taking offense seems to be the default setting of a lot of people these days, but I am incredibly proud of the fact that all of our kids (I include DSIL, too) show up and work hard. All three of them knuckled down last year and did what they had to in order to keep moving forward. DD#1 transitioned to teletherapy (not an easy thing to do in a hands-on profession like hers), her husband finished dental school in the midst of a lockdown, and DD#2 not only made her base salary but additional income in commissions. Honestly, it’s not hard. You can either sit around and whine about how hard and unfair things are, or you can get out there and make things happen. The husband is going to have lots of opportunities for some young guys to show up and make good money this summer. We’ll see who actually wants to do it.

March Miscellany

I parked myself in front of the computer yesterday morning and worked on the Cobbles pattern. I have a different tech editor now, and I think this will be a productive working relationship. I am reminded again of Jean Lampe’s advice to me as a new knitting designer. She suggested I write out instructions for tying a shoe so that someone else could follow them. That sounds easy enough. It’s not. And you never know what baggage people are going to bring with them when reading your pattern. The Sandhill Sling pattern included cutting instructions for interfacing pieces. I assumed that those were for the lining, because I always interface quilt cotton when I use it for lining. They weren’t. They were intended for the exterior pieces. Had I bothered to read the pattern instead of making that assumption based on bag patterns I’ve made in the past, I would have noted that small detail.

[It doesn’t really matter, as I can’t interface the waxed canvas I’m using for the exterior, and I prefer the added body that the interfacing gives the quilt cotton lining, but I was scratching my head there for a bit.]

The baby quilt is quilted and just needs a binding. I’ll have to start on the Big Top quilt soon and the Beginner’s Choice wallhanging, although I still have no idea how I want to quilt either of them. I am hoping that inspiration strikes when I sit down at the machine.

I got an e-mail notice that my fat quarter bundle of Corey Yoder’s new line Spring Brook has shipped.

I generally do not buy fat quarter bundles of fabric collections, but I made an exception for this one. Last spring, I tried to make a quilt using a smaller fat quarter bundle of Corey Yoder’s Pepper and Flax fabric collection. I didn’t have enough fabric, and nothing in my stash coordinated well with the colorway. (That is why I don’t buy fat quarter bundles.) Of course, that line was no longer available. I put the blocks away in a box. When I saw this line—which is basically the same colorway as Pepper and Flax with some blues thrown in—I decided to go ahead and get a fat quarter bundle to see if I could finish the quilt I started as I really hate having large unfinished projects hanging around.

My habit of noodling around in EQ8 for 15 minutes over morning coffee has resulted in a new quilt block design, or at least a quilt block I have not yet been able to find anywhere else. I haven’t made an exhaustive search of the Jinny Beyer book, however, to see if it’s in there. Of course, the block then wanted to be put into a quilt design. I love the design and even made up a test block yesterday, but I’m shelving it until I get some of these other tasks finished and crossed off the list. And everyone seems to love that purple and green block—who knew? I may go ahead and put that one into the queue as well.

*****************************************************

The husband and I were talking over dinner last night and I mentioned that I am going to have WS on Saturday as Elysian is taking an all-day class. I am trying to decide what to do with this 7 year-old for the day. I thought we might take a trip to Missoula as it’s supposed to be in the 50s this weekend. The husband said, “He probably just wants to watch TV all day.” (The little boys do not get a lot of screen time at their houses.) Just then, there was a knock on the door—it was WS with a delivery from his mom. I said to him, “What do you want to do on Saturday when you’re here?” and he said, “I just want to watch TV.” That made the husband laugh.

I might let him watch some TV, but not for 8 straight hours. I think he should spend some time out in the shop with the husband, talking his ear off. That would be good for both of them.

*****************************************************

I’ve got to take the car in to the tire place. The left front tire has a slow leak. Every couple of weeks now, since the first of the year, the low pressure sensor on that wheel goes off. The weird thing is that it only happens on Sundays. After church. The husband put the car up on the lift over the weekend—he had to change out one of my fog lights because it took a hit by a rock and had a hole in it—and he said he didn’t see any nails in the tire. It might be a bad valve stem. I’ll have the tire place look at it and get their recommendation.

The Annual Cabin Fever Post

Tomorrow is the first of March. In my head, I know that it’s going to be a while before I can work in the garden—this is Montana, after all, where 3” of snow in June is not unheard of—but I equate March with spring and I am starting to get a bad case of cabin fever. In years past, I have taken a trip somewhere. Even just going to Portland or Seattle in February reminds me that winter doesn’t last forever. I wasn’t able to do that this year. The husband and I watched videos on YouTube last night that someone had taken at the summit of Snoqualmie Pass over the past couple of days. Despite being a major east-west highway (I-90), the pass has been closed almost as much as it has been open recently. This isn’t the snowiest season on record for that area, but it’s in the top 10. The Cascades have been getting hammered with snowstorms.

[I went over Snoqualmie in a snowstorm during the second week of April, which is why I don’t take the snow tires off my car until May.]

In any case, I am getting twitchy. I want to clean the house (the dust! the dog hair!) and take a few loads of stuff to the thrift store, but there is no point in doing that until I can clean out the storage container and load the car on a driveway that isn’t a skating rink.

I shouldn’t be designing new quilts, either—I have patterns to work on and already-pieced tops to finish. And Tuesday marks a year since my MIL died. We all miss her and feel her absence keenly.

I did make a quilt block yesterday. I couldn’t help myself.

EQ8 calls this block Four Crowns, for what that’s worth; quilt block names are fluid and this block has a number of variations. These are my thoughts about it. If you have some, drop them in the comments.

• I like this color/fabric combination. Do I like it enough to make a quilt out of it? Are three colors enough? I spent some time making little HSTs in pink and also in yellow to see how they looked in the corners instead of the green flower print. In the end, I kept coming back to the green. (There was a dark purple in the fabric pull, but the design I am contemplating has alternating “chain” blocks and I was going to use the dark purple in those blocks.)

• I am not crazy about quilts with white backgrounds. We have too much dirt and dust here for quilts with white backgrounds.

• The block is not hard to piece, for all that it has a lot of units. I could probably stand to make a couple dozen of them.

• I am not much for matchy-matchy quilts, and this has that feel to me. The block would lend itself well to scrappiness, I think, with a few rules governing color placement so that it doesn’t end up looking like an incoherent free-for-all.

So we’ll see. I may have scratched this itch sufficiently with one block. After I finished the block, I cleaned my sewing area. I put everything away except what I need to quilt the tops and finish the Sandhill Sling. I am trying to keep myself from getting distracted by new projects. Discipline.

I’ve been working on my Urban Chicken embroidery project in the evenings, alternating with a prayer shawl. As soon as I get about 8” of the shawl done, I’ll put it in a tote bag and leave it at church as the new emergency knitting project.

Creative Procrastination

As a general rule, I do not procrastinate. The anxiety I feel when facing a difficult task does not even come close to the level of anxiety I feel if I put it off. It is far better for my psyche just to suck it up and do it.

I’ve got two quilt tops to quilt. They are all basted and ready to go. I enjoy machine quilting, but I have not started either one because I have no idea how I’m going to quilt them. Should I do an allover free motion pattern? Rulerwork? A combination? I am paralyzed with indecision.

I tell myself that the answer will come to me eventually, and that I should do something else in the meantime. The “something else” I did yesterday was procrasti-quilting—or, more accurately, “procrasti-designing.” Is anyone else craving flowers? I want to make something floral-y, so I did what any normal person would do and went stash diving.

I have all my fabric sorted broadly by color, with a few extra bins for specifics. I have one bin with multi-color floral/geometric fabric and another for polka-dots. Edyta Sitar talks a lot about her “rule of five,” where she chooses a large print, a medium print, a small print, a polka dot, and a stripe as the basis of a quilt. That works great if you have an entire coordinating fabric line at your disposal, but I like to work from my stash. And I am not much for stripes as I find them kind of fussy.

Cavorting around the stash was fun, but now I’ve got another half-dozen ideas for designs. I pulled this fabric combo:

I don’t know what it is about me and acid green. I adore that color. Purple, on the other hand . . . my bin of purple fabrics is about half the size of my other bins. I like this combination, but I think it does need a polka dot to liven things up a bit, and maybe a tiny lavender floral . . . or a hint of yellow?

I pulled a few other combos, too, but I’m going to let them marinate for a while. It isn’t always about actually making a quilt from these fabric pulls. Sometimes it’s just the creative process of exploring possibilities.

I also went ahead with the next few steps on the Sandhill Sling:

This is actually a better representation of the color of the waxed canvas. The piece on the left is the zipper gusset, which is now one large loop that will get sewn around the front and back pieces. The piece on the right is the back of the sling; it needs to have the strap connector and the D-ring basted to it. I may wait on further steps until the next video comes out, because I haven’t decided if I want to sew the lining in by hand or by machine. The steps are different for each method. I usually sew my linings in by machine, but I am not opposed to hand sewing this one. My industrial Necchi is a flatbed only. It doesn’t have a free arm, so sewing the lining in by machine might be tricky. (Anna does recommend a free arm for that step.) My Janome is set down in a table, too, so I’d have to lift it out to access the free arm.

I got out the supplies for the Slabtown Backpack and put them in a bin:

I went ahead and bought the hardware kit for this pattern as I didn’t want to have to try to source everything individually. I added the option of the green felt padding for the leather straps to match the green of the backpack. (There is that green again. . . )

I also got a round of edits back on the Cobbles pattern, with some excellent suggestions for both that pattern and quilt pattern presentation overall. I’ll work on incorporating those in the next couple of days.

Bordering

I’ve lost all concept of time passing. Some people attribute that to the pandemic. Maybe that’s true. I know that switching from daylight savings to standard time really messed me up this year. I guess we’ll see what happens in a couple of weeks when we go back to DST. I wish we’d just stay there.

The husband left around 7 a.m. yesterday morning and I headed upstairs to sew. I had two items at the top of the to-do list: putting borders on the Christmas wallhanging and borders on the Big Top quilt. I had the fabric pressed and ready to go, so I queued up some YouTube videos and got to work.

I like the border fabric for the wallhanging, but I am not sure I like the border fabric on the wallhanging, if that makes any sense. I was trying to stick to what I had in the stash. This print was one of the few pieces of sufficient size as my Christmas fabrics are mostly remnants.

This wallhanging was so fast and easy to make that I am thinking of making another one in some flowery spring prints anyway. I think that once this has some black or gold binding on it, the border won’t look so odd.

[And now we know how the Beginner’s Choice block looks made up in the way I think it was intended in the original printing. It really is easy enough for a newbie quilter.]

I added a bright red feedsack print as a border on the Big Top quilt:

I got both of the borders done and then went to see what I had for backings and batting. I had a cotton/wool blend throw-size batting in the stash that I plan to use for the wallhanging. I haven’t used that blend before and I am curious to see how it quilts up. I did not have backings for either piece and I also needed batting for the Big Top quilt.

I dithered for a few minutes about whether or not I wanted to run to town to get a batting and some backing or wait until today or tomorrow, when I would normally run errands. The sun was shining and the roads were clear. As it is supposed to snow again today, I decided I would go ahead and make a special trip while the weather was good. I thought I might eat lunch, first, before I left.

And then I glanced at the clock. It was 9:42 a.m.

In fairness, I do get up at 4:00 a.m. and usually eat breakfast then. Still, I hadn’t used up much of the day at all. I had a snack and headed into town.

The wallhanging measures 45” x 45.” Quilt cotton fabric is 44/45” wide, but I need to have a few inches overhang all around for quilting. That meant either getting some wideback fabric—which is 108” wide—or piecing a backing from regular quilt cotton. This is Kalispell. The chances of finding wideback Christmas fabric are less than zero. In any case, a wideback (Christmas print or not), would be a bit of overkill for a wallhanging. Thankfully, Joanns has all of their Christmas fabric on sale for 50% off. I needed three yards. I picked up some batting there because it was also on sale.

The Big Top quilt top finished at 66” x 77” with the borders on it. I would have loved to put a wideback on it, but I knew that the chances of finding a wideback in a feedsack print were also less than zero. (That’s true everywhere, not just in Kalispell, as they aren’t common.) My choices were to use a solid-color wideback, like Kona; use 108” muslin, probably what they used during the Depression; or piece something from yardage.

One of the quilt stores had wideback Kona in Natural, which is what I used for the background on the front. (I think I may have said it was Kona Snow in an earlier post, but the quilt store checked my purchase history and it was Kona Natural.) That is a bit heftier than plain muslin but gives the same look, so I went with that.

Today’s tasks include getting the backings pressed and then laying out and basting both tops. The Big Top quilt is still small enough that I can do it here instead of at the church.

While the fabric was in the washer—and because it was still only about 2:00 p.m.—I worked on the second installment of the Sandhill Sling sewalong. The e-mail with the video came out yesterday morning. Anna Graham has a YouTube channel for Noodlehead, her design business, but she doesn’t have these videos linked there. They are—understandably—hidden on YouTube and available only to people who signed up for the sewalong. I would prefer to watch them on the TV upstairs, closer to the cutting table, but I can’t do that unless I hook the laptop up to the TV.

But I am sewing on the industrial Necchi, which is here in my office, so I’d be going up and down the steps either way. It’s good exercise. Last week’s instructions were for the strap. This week, we did the outer pocket, the inside pocket, and rounded the edges of the body pieces (I can’t quite get the colors right—that waxed canvas is a much brighter blue, not navy):

I chose to do the outer zipper pocket (view A) with the rain flap as I’ve never done one of those before. View B is a patch pocket with a flap and magnetic closure. The inside pocket has an elastic casing at the top.

Every one of Anna’s patterns is top-notch and easy to follow even without a video. She’s a good teacher, however, and pleasant to listen to. Nothing so far in this pattern is tricky. I think that sewing the gusset on might be a bit squirrely just because of the size of the bag, but we’ll see. I did Betz White’s Ravenwood Messenger Bag (three years ago already—I started that one in February 2018, just before I got the flu) and it was of similar construction but overall more complicated. That is a pattern I would love to make again.

I finally got the Necchi adjusted to where it will sew this waxed canvas without much complaint, which is good because I’d like to start the Slabtown Backpack soon and it is also out of Klum House canvas. For the next couple of days, though, I am going to be quilting on the Q20 in an effort to get these tops finished.

The Unknown Quilt Block

Does anyone else remember The Unknown Comic?

I finished the first draft of the pattern for Cobbles and Pebbles yesterday morning and sent it off for editing. I also got Big Top laid out in EQ8. I am not relying on EQ8 to do math for me; all of that gets set up in an Excel spreadsheet. I think it’s actually good for me to be using a couple of different programs—between Illustrator, EQ8, and Excel, I see the pattern from several different angles.

The Cobbles quilt went with me to church Sunday so I could get a picture. Our balcony works really well for quilt pictures and Ken and Steve—the two brothers who sing in our quartet—were willing to hold it up for me.

In the end, I didn’t add a border. I bound the quilt with a dark brown print to provide a frame for it.

I love the fact that it is much easier to customize a quilt than it is to customize a knitting design. Someone might really like a sweater design but prefers a crew neck to the V-neck in the pattern. Changing the neckline of a knitted design takes some knowledge and effort. It doesn’t require a lot of extra work to add a border to a quilt, or leave one off. Or add another row of blocks.

I’ve finished most of the blocks for the Beginner’s Choice/Christmas Fabric wallhanging. That one is going to need a name. Also, I am a bit baffled as to why I cannot find this block—either the 6” unit or the 12” block—in any existing patterns. It seems so simple to me that surely, someone besides Laura Wheeler has based a design on it. If you’ve seen it somewhere, would you please drop me a link in the comments?

Here are my 6” units waiting to be sewn together:

I use some oversized cookie sheets that my friend Anna gifted me. They don’t fit in my oven, but they work really well for laying out quilt blocks.

[I’ve noticed that I tend to go back and forth between brights and neutrals in my projects.]

I need to add the borders to both Big Top and this Christmas fabric wallhanging and get them quilted. That makes four designs; the husband said I should revise my goal for the year upward, but I reminded him that my goal is four finished and published designs. I won’t have met my goal until all of these patterns are for sale in the shop. I am hoping I can add Cobbles before too long.

Our neighbor Mike texted me yesterday about starting seeds, which reminded me that I’ve only got about another month before growing season starts. Our neighbors are all welcome to start seedlings for their gardens in our greenhouse. We have tons of pots and flats and I’m out there every day making sure things get watered. He wanted to check on the timing, but it’s a bit early yet.

****************************************************

The husband and I watched one of Jack Spirko’s YouTube videos last night. He and his family are in Texas and he reviewed their experiences with the recent cold snap. He noted that it’s important to write things down, like all the steps for starting the generator, so that you’re not trying to remember them in the cold and dark. I mentioned to the husband that I had a cheat sheet for starting the generator and that I had actually used it one time at 2 a.m. because he was gone on a fire call and the power had gone out. I got the sheet for him—I keep it on the filing cabinet in my office with a magnet—and he looked it over and pronounced it “very thorough.” (It includes an admonition not to stand between the weld leads, LOL.) Our fire chief often says, “You perform as you practice.” It’s a good idea to practice some of these things so they become second-nature in an emergency when tunnel vision sets in.

I think it’s also important to recognize normalcy bias in ourselves and others. That’s the tendency of human beings to underestimate potential threats and assume that if something bad hasn’t happened yet, it won’t ever happen. I keep hearing over and over, “Texas doesn’t get this kind of weather so no one was prepared for it.” Well, now we know that Texas DOES get this kind of weather. And what if what takes out the power grid next time isn’t weather? What if it’s a computer hacker?

Perhaps it’s a side effect of having had cancer (leukemia) at the age of 28 and a bad bout with the flu a few years ago, but I’m willing to consider that anything is a possibility. And as the husband notes, it’s usually the things you never see coming that take you out.

Sucked in By a Quilt Block

I said I was quilted out, but I sewed yesterday anyway. The husband went out to the new shop to finish rebuilding the outhouse (the story is on his blog if you’re curious) and I went upstairs to commune with fabric. I got sucked in by that Laura Wheeler Beginner’s Choice block—the simple version, not the Jinny Beyer version—and decided to make one to see what I thought. One block led to a few more and now I am about a third of the way through a wallhanging comprised of thirty-six 6” blocks.

These are four of the blocks sewn together. The black print and the light glitter fabric are Christmas remnants I picked up at Joanns after the holidays, and the gold is some metallic Grunge. I’ve got another Christmas print with these same colors that I plan to use as a border.

I am so lazy—I set up the Janome for piecing half-square triangles (two at a time) and the Necchi for piecing the blocks so I wouldn’t have to keep changing feet. My Necchi’s quarter-inch foot has a blade on the right side and it’s not good for making HSTs. The two machines sit at right angles to each other so it works out nicely.

I also made the strap and strap connector for the Sandhill Sling. You would think that with as many supplies as I have on hand that I would have what I needed for this bag. Nope. I had the waxed canvas that I wanted to use, which is the Klum House canvas in royal blue. I have a couple of byAnnie purse zippers in royal blue, but the blues did not match. The pattern gives the option for making the strap from webbing or from fabric, but that canvas is so oily that I don’t want to use it for the strap lest some of the oil come off on my clothes. I had navy blue 1-1/2” wide cotton webbing, but the navy blue purse zippers in my stash don’t match the fabric well, either. I finally settled on some dark beige poly webbing from the stash and I think I can find purse zippers in a color to match it. If not, I have some lighter beige purse zippers on hand and will use those.

Then I went stash-diving to find hardware. I had some of what I needed in the appropriate size but the wrong color. And I had some of what I needed in the appropriate color but the wrong size. I found a hook in antique gold and a D-ring in antique gold, but the D-ring was just a bit too big, so I made the D-ring strap in the pattern a bit bigger to accommodate it.

I think I am on track now. I made the strap and strap connector yesterday and I am ready for this week’s set of instructions.

*************************************************

I’ve been watching this debacle in Texas unfold and I have some thoughts. I understand that people are suffering—there are always people in situations not of their making who don’t have the means to prepare for these kinds of events. These comments aren’t directed at them. These comments are for the people who are whining on social media about how awful things are, that they haven’t had power for 36 hours, they’re cold, and they have nothing to eat. They are also on the hunt for someone to blame—preferably someone of the opposing political party.

Think about that for a moment. If you can get on social media to tell the world that you’ve been inconvenienced by something for which you had days to prepare, I have no sympathy for you. I understand that not everyone can prepare for cold weather like we do here in Montana. (Even here in Montana, we have people who act like winter is a surprise.) There are plenty of things you can do, and should do, however:

The number one thing is to stop behaving as though someone or something is going to save you in an emergency. If you are a functioning adult human being with even basic resources, you are responsible for you. If you are a functioning adult human being and you choose not to be responsible for you, you are taking emergency resources from people who truly need them.

Americans seem to think that they are entitled to always-and-perfectly-functioning infrastructure. There are so many things that can take out power for hours or days; you should operate with the mindset that this is something that can and will happen and prepare for it accordingly. No electricity? Have flashlights and batteries. No heat? I am rather baffled by all the people who said they ran out of propane during this storm or were waiting for propane deliveries to almost-empty tanks. It’s February. Keep your tanks topped off during the winter. Yes, it would be nice to have a backup generator, but they are big and expensive. Figure out how to conserve what heat you do have. Close off rooms. Hang blankets. Have warm clothes on hand. Non-electric heaters are out there, but you need to be careful about carbon monoxide. No water? Before the electricity goes out, fill the bathtub. Fill the sinks. Fill all the pots and pans and containers you have. You can get large plastic carboys in the camping section at Wal-Mart and fill them ahead of time. No way to cook food? Have a bunch of stuff on hand that doesn’t require cooking—granola bars, jerky, cans of fruit (make sure you have a can opener). The camping section of Wal-Mart has freeze-dried foods available. Store some. Worried about pipes freezing and bursting? Know where the water shutoff is and drain your pipes ahead of time. No bathroom facilities? You can buy a toilet seat for a five-gallon bucket and some plastic bags and turn it into a camping toilet.

Bottom line: It won’t be fun and you probably won’t enjoy it, but there are ways to get through these kinds of events and come out fine on the other side. Expecting the government to fix things so you never have to be inconvenienced is not one of those ways. (When did we become a country of people so unable to take care of ourselves?)

Some resources you may find helpful:

The Survival Podcast: Jack Spirko has been doing his podcast for years, and the tagline is “Helping You Live a Better Life If Times Get Tough, or Even If They Don’t.” That says it all. And guess what?—Jack lives in Texas. He’s got lots of specifics.

Living Free in Tennessee: I have said before that this is one of my favorite podcasts. The “Holler Neighbors” recently did a YouTube video where they talked about all the things they did to prepare for this storm. Community is a big part of this. Your neighbors may have resources that they are willing to share in an emergency (but don’t be a mooch).

Read the book One Second After by William R. Forstchen. It may terrify you so much that you won’t sleep for days, but it may also spur you into some action. And if you can stomach that one, read the sequel called One Year After.

Or e-mail me. I can tell you some of the things we do here, many of which are relatively inexpensive. The key is to make these preparations when things are quiet and stable.

Over That Hurdle

Releasing a pattern is nervewracking. It’s worse than sending a child off to college. I am pleased with the positive response that Noon and Night got, however, and I am motivated to get the other patterns finished and added to the store. Thank you, especially, to everyone who helped spread the word!

I’m aware that by social media standards, I didn’t do my pattern launch correctly. I should have had a coordinated release across Facebook, MeWe, Instagram, and Twitter. I should have had a giveaway. I should have lined up people to help create buzz. I should have created technique videos to accompany the pattern and posted them on YouTube. I should have used the right hashtags.

If I had had to do all of that in order for Noon and Night to be launched “properly,” it never would have seen the light of day.

[I unfollowed someone on Instagram a couple of weeks ago because of the unrelenting perfection of her feed—her house was always spotless and decorated properly for the season, her beautiful, talented children dressed in coordinating outfits, her projects never had any hiccups, she had dozens of hashtags on each of her posts, and it’s always sunny where she lives. I didn’t find it inspiring at all. I found it unrealistic.]

I’m not in this to become rich or famous. I don’t want to design two fabric lines every year and a dozen quilts to go with each one. I don’t want a YouTube channel. The universe has gifted me with an unexpected and unasked-for journey, and I plan to enjoy every bit of it. I am going to make the kind of quilts I like to make, share them with the world, and if other people want to walk along with me, I’ll do my best to make it fun and worthwhile. And I might remember to put hashtags on my Instagram posts, if I actually remember to post to Instagram.

*****************************************************

I put the Big Top quilt top together Thursday:

I still want to add a couple of borders. Right now, the top measures 56” x 68”. I took yesterday off from sewing and ran some errands in town for the husband. To be honest, I am a bit quilted out. I need to do something else for a few days. Tera texted me that she is also going to do the Sandhill Sling sewalong. The first set of instructions came out this week, for the strap, so I think I will work on that. And next week is going to be devoted to pattern writing.

The husband has been busy moving snow, because it is not always sunny where we live:

He plows, but then the snow piles have to be moved with the backhoe so they aren’t blocking access or lines of sight.

Several of the piles are 12’ tall. I look at them and think that I should invite the little boys over to go sledding with me, but then I remember that I am 55 years old and sledding is probably a bad idea.

*****************************************************

One of my guilty pleasures is Haagen-Dazs ice cream. I am particularly fond of the Whiskey Hazelnut Latte. I went to get myself some the other night and as I was opening the freezer, the husband said, “It’s all gone. I ate it.”

I buy him his own H-D ice cream—usually Vanilla or Coffee in the large containers because one of the small containers is a single serving in his world—but he had eaten all of that so he finished off mine. The number of calories he consumes in a day is astonishing, even to me who has been feeding him for 30+ years. My food is supposed to be off-limits, but sometimes he needs a reminder. I did a big ice cream resupply for both of us this week and then got out the sharpie marker.

He doesn’t even like whiskey, LOL.

It’s the little things that keep the romance alive! He usually asks before he hoovers down the last of something, but I think I had already gone to bed.

Introducing Noon and Night!

My first quilting pattern is available for sale in the Buttercup Made store!

The journey to this quilt pattern started in 2013 when my friend Vicki brought a quilt top to the ladies at our church to be finished. The design was scrappy multi-colored stars on a muslin background and had been pieced by her great-grandmother, Florence Aikey. Vicki had this to say about the quilt:

I believe many of the prints in her quilts were scraps from housedresses and clothes she made for my mother and her siblings when they were children in the '30s. I believe it was one of her first quilts because it remained as an unfinished top until the ladies at Mountain View Mennonite Church finished the quilting about 75 years later!! Nana went on to become a very accomplished quilter and finished dozens of them until she passed away in 1978.

For a few weeks, we had Vicki’s finished Noon and Night quilt hanging in our church’s fellowship hall. My friend Margaret and I—Margaret is one of the “quilting ladies” at our church and an avid quilt historian—stood there one Sunday looking at the quilt and trying to figure out the name of the block. She had never seen it before, and she’s looked at a lot of quilts over the years.

I went home and started researching. I went down lots of rabbit trails. As it turns out, that block is called “Noon and Night” and is attributed to Laura Wheeler (a fictitious designer of quilt blocks in the 1930s and 1940s). The block had been published in the Kansas City Star in the mid-1930s. Because it relied on templates for its construction, however, it fell out of favor in the era of rotary-cut, geometric quilt designs. About a year ago, I decided to see if I could design and write a set of instructions for cutting and piecing the quilt that didn’t rely on templates.

This quilt is the result. After much experimentation, I decided to re-create it in reproduction feedsack prints on a black cotton background. All the pieces are cut with a rotary cutter and ruler, and while the construction is a bit unorthodox, the stars come together beautifully in a 10” block. I chose to go “controlled scrappy” rather than use the original light-and-dark layout that gives the block its name. Each star has a center diamond composed of a single print. The other elements in the block are scrappy, in keeping with the quilts of the Depression era.

This has been a long and fascinating journey and now I get to share the results with other quilters. The regular price of the pattern is $10.00, but for the next week, it will be on sale for $8.00. The pattern includes instructions for making the quilt in four sizes from lap to queen. The design is scrap-friendly and fat-quarter friendly, and although it was inspired by a 1930s block and fabric, it looks great in modern prints as well. I hope you’ll enjoy making it as much as I did!

The Amazement Zone

I need to come up for air today and take care of some paperwork and errands. I spent most of yesterday working on the Big Top quilt. Designing something—be it a sweater or a quilt—is a process fraught with a rollercoaster of emotions: excitement at beginning something new, dismay when an idea doesn’t pan out as envisioned, a sense of accomplishment at overcoming an obstacle, and a bit of amazement when the whole thing comes together in the end. I was in the amazement zone yesterday and wanted to stay there as long as possible.

I’ve been watching a lot of podcasts/YouTube videos, especially A Quilting Life, which is the weekly podcast by Sherri McConnell of A Quilting Life and her daughter, Chelsi Stratton, of Chelsi Stratton Designs. I love to hear designers talk about how they design and how they sew. I am especially impressed by designers who have a vision and know how to get from that vision to a finished product because I tend to operate by the seat of my pants. I have never designed a quilt by figuring out exactly what I need, cutting all the pieces, and sewing all the blocks. With this Big Top quilt, I pulled out all my reproduction feed sack fabric and some background yardage and started by cutting enough pieces for enough blocks to determine if my idea was workable or not. When I ran out of one print, I switched to another. When I needed more pieces, I cut them. I put everything up on my design wall and moved units around. I did the same thing with Noon and Night and with Cobbles.

My way isn’t better or worse; it’s just what works for me. I think it’s also why I don’t like to design in EQ8. Would EQ8 have told me that the loud navy blue print became sedate and well-behaved when I paired it with a medium-blue floral? Nope. I had to move it around several times to figure out where it belonged (and then I added a bit more of it). The entire construction process for this quilt has evolved as well. The original quilt had one kind of block, which became another kind of block, which became two separate blocks dependent on a specific layout. And that, by extension, has dictated how I plan to present this pattern. CAD software is good for some things, but not for everything (or every designing style). Ask the husband some time about his experiences with architects’ foundation plans in the real world. He will tell you that 23’ 5/16” might be the measurement the computer spits out, but he can’t form that.

I am also thinking of this book:

I like Stuart Hillard a lot—he has some great YouTube videos. The Amazon reviews for this book, however, seems to indicate that many of the designs were created virtually and never tested by making up a real quilt, and there are problems with the instructions as a result.

It is what it is. I am 55 years old and unlikely to change my ways now. I suspect that the reason so many designers design in EQ8 and stick to less complicated designs is because they are working with fabric companies and are required to produce two fabric lines a year with a dozen projects made from each line. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for experimentation.

Big Top isn’t going to be a huge quilt, just because I don’t really want to make any more blocks. After 80+ Drunkard’s Path units, I am really good at sewing curves. Really good. So good that I should probably design something else with curved piecing. For now, though, I need to add setting and corner triangles to what I have pieced so far, then put on a border or two and get it quilted.

This is design #3 for 2021 for anyone keeping score. My goal was four designs for this year. At the rate I’m uncovering quilt blocks left and right in my research, I’ll have plenty of ideas to work with. I can’t believe some of them have never been used in a design, or at least designs that I can find with Pinterest or a Google image search.

Seeing Patterns

[I apologize in advance for the length of this blog post. I had a lot to cover and it got away from me.]

Human brains are wired to see patterns. It’s how we make sense of the world. What’s odd (and oddly fascinating) is that two people can look at exactly the same picture, collection of data, etc., and see vastly different patterns.

Speaking of brains, the universe is currently using mine as a playground. I should note that I like to spend about half an hour every night before bed looking at Pinterest. My theory is that doing so primes my subconscious to make all sorts of connections while I’m sleeping. When I get up in the morning, I spend another 30 minutes over coffee looking at Pinterest or Google image searches again. That’s when my brain is awake and ready to do some heavy lifting.

Thanks to Noon and Night, I am a bit obsessed with Laura Wheeler quilt patterns. Laura Wheeler is believed to be a fictitious character—much like Betty Crocker—whose quilt block designs appeared in publications in the US starting around 1933. Some Laura Wheeler blocks, like Cleopatra’s Fan, are popular enough that Accuquilt has made dies for them. Other Laura Wheeler blocks seem to have faded into oblivion. When Barbara Brackman writes about Laura Wheeler on her quilt history blog, Material Culture, her comments always seem to be tinged with a bit of exasperation. Many Laura Wheeler quilt blocks are overly complicated and designed in such a way that interesting secondary patterns would appear when the blocks were set together.

I wonder if the block in yesterday’s post was a Laura Wheeler block?

I purchased this wonderful book last year:

It’s a compilation of Laura Wheeler quilt blocks—just the block illustrations, no instructions—but Noon and Night is in there. The block from yesterday’s post is not, but Barbara Brackman notes that she thought she had found all of the Laura Wheeler/Alice Brooks quilt blocks and then several more surfaced.

I created a Pinterest board this morning to help me keep track of all this Laura Wheeler ephemera, and in my travels, I ran across this:

It appeared in the Burlington Free Press. (I didn’t crop the photo because the story of the opera costume designer that appears below the quilt is hilarious—see if you can zoom in enough to read it.) I looked at this clipping and thought, “What an attractive and easy quilt! I wonder if anyone has made that up? Look, the block is called ‘Beginner’s Choice,’ which makes sense as it appears to be on a 3 x 3 grid and comprised of squares and half-square triangles. And it only uses three fabrics! Definitely a win-win for a beginning quilter.”

I went and drew up the block in EQ8:

You’ll note that I only drew the 3 x 3 portion of the overall design, because it is this single block which rotates as it moves across the rows that creates the overall design.

The next thing I did was to search the web for a Laura Wheeler block called Beginner’s Choice. I did not see any blocks that looked like the one I drew, nor any finished quilts that looked like the one in the newspaper clipping, but I did find the Early Women Masters website with a block that looks like this:

The note accompanying this piecing grid indicates that this block appears in Jinny Beyer’s Quilter’s Album of Patchwork Patterns, so I went and looked. Yes, it does, on page 145-12, where it is listed as being on a 6 x 6 grid.

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t describe a block of that complexity as “beginner” anything. Theoretically, I think this 6 x 6 block could also be made using nothing but half-square triangles and squares, but it’s those trapezoid pieces that are throwing things off. (And one of my quibbles with this book is the use of patterned “fabric” in the illustrations, because I think it unnecessarily muddles the waters when it comes to deconstructing blocks.)

So I am left with a puzzle. I think the block that appears in the newspaper clipping is simple enough that it is deserving of the name “Beginner’s Choice.” How did the “Beginner’s Choice” block that appears on the website and in the Beyer book end up being so complicated?

I went back to the American Legacy Quilt Index book and indeed, an illustration of Laura Wheeler’s “Beginner’s Choice” block appears there:

I suppose that one could look at this illustration and assume that those chisel-shaped pieces forming the center blades of the pinwheel had to have been cut out of one piece of fabric rather than being formed by a square next to a half-square triangle. If that was the case, one also could be forgiven for assuming that other parts of the block had to be equally odd-shaped. After all, if it had been designed by Laura Wheeler, it couldn’t have been simple, right?

I’m going to test my theory (when I find 24 more hours in the day) and make up a wallhanging using the block I drew in EQ8. I think that with a small-scale print, it’s not going to be noticeable if that chisel portion is made with two pieces of fabric rather than a single piece.

*******************************************

I did tie myself to my office chair this morning and worked on patterns and the website. Noon and Night will go up for sale some time this week, I think. I’m a bit stuck on what illustrations to add to the Cobbles pattern, so that one is on hold for the moment. The Cobbles quilt itself is bound and finished. I just need to get a photo. Hanging quilts off the loft railing in the new shop works really well—I tested that system over the weekend—but the lights are pretty bright in there and they tend to wash out the colors. I need to monkey around with only having one of the banks of lights on, I think.

Under the Big Top

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?

************************************************

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.

************************************************

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.

February Deep Freeze

It was a balmy -20 (air temp) when I woke up this morning.

Thankfully, this cold snap is supposed to be short-lived. The husband is keeping his fire gear in the kitchen so that it’s warm enough to get into should he have to go to a structure fire. We hope that doesn’t happen, as fighting fires in subzero temps comes with a whole set of additional issues beyond trying to save someone’s house. Pumps freeze up, engines won’t start, etc.

We are grateful to be warm inside.

I ran errands yesterday and didn’t get much sewing done. I did pick up a Creative Grids Circle Savvy Ruler, though. It took me a bit of searching to find it at the quilt store, not because their display is messy (it’s not), but because I was looking for something smaller and didn’t realize that the ruler is approximately 11” x 18”. I tried it out last night and it is going to make cutting go quickly. I think often about what Jenny Doan of Missouri Star Quilt Company says: You have to find the rulers that make sense to your brain.

Noon and Night is back from the tech editor and I am going through the suggested changes. That was definitely a worthwhile experience as it has helped me distill down my preferred approach to designing and writing patterns.

I am still a bit baffled by the fact that many of the very old, very cool quilt block designs that I run across in my internet travels have never made it into quilt designs. That gives me a lot to work with—I have a stack of ideas—but I wonder why we’ve been so quick to discard some of these blocks in favor of ones that lend themselves well to use with precuts. I know time is at a premium for many people, but as I’ve noted before in my role as a church pianist, the world doesn’t need Yet Another Arrangement of Amazing Grace.

Today will be devoted to finishing the quilting on Cobbles and getting that one bound. I would also like to give you some sneak peeks at the next quilt if I can get part of it assembled this weekend. Showing you one or two blocks won’t give you a sense of the overall design.