Gonna make it...

Miss me? This is how I have felt this semester:

(If you can't see the embedded video...watch here.)

But the last exam is written, the grading is all caught up, estoy lista para my Spanish test, and so I have a few moments for some stitchery. I chopped up all the little bitty pieces for a Pixel Pop quilt, using some periwinkle fabrics that have been canoodling in my Strategic Fabric Reserves for quite some time. I guess it's time for their love to be out in the open.

Pixel Pop -- neat name for a fun modern design

I'm making the smaller (45 x 55") version with pops of the little Tula Pink charm packs that I got when I sewed the shirt for Ms. Pink's brother.

The sewing for this quilt is simple, but the challenge is keeping the bits organized -- I'll see how well I did as I work through each block. The accent fabric is just slightly darker than the main background, with a little shimmer that doesn't photograph well but looks really fun in the sunlight.

Block A, Pixel Pop

T-shirt progress

I mentioned that a friend of mine has asked me to make a t-shirt quilt; I thought I'd try something a little different than other t-shirt quilts that I've made and seen by using...wait for it...hexagons (there it is again!). Okay, technically the pieces won't all be hexagons, but variations on the 60-degree angle shapes nonetheless.

On Friday night I decided to start by ironing the stabilizer onto the shirts that she gave me back on October. But that's a boring job to do all at once, so once the first shirt was ready I decided just to give it a whirl and start cutting the shapes. The largest size on the hex-and-more ruler was perfect. I added matching triangles to end up with 12" triangle units (thanks again for the Christmas present, boys!), which will be the building block for the whole project.

First unit from Aimee's triangle t-shirt quilt

Two of the pieces were so small (and obviously from one shirt) that I combined them into a single triangle: I cut the upper piece using the Hex n More "Jewel" shape, then added a thin wide strip with the eyes as the bottom of the triangle unit.

Combination unit from Aimee's triangle t-shirt quilt

Once I had the first few pieces worked up, momentum kept me going. By the time the boys' movie was finished, I had cut all of the background triangles (from a pretty jewel-colored print that coordinates perfectly with this collection of shirts), and trimmed & pieced 11 of the 17 shirts. For the pieces that were much larger, I squared (or angled) them off as large as possible, then added coordinating fabrics to get them to a usable shape. So far I have one 12" hexagon -- I don't have a ruler for that, but I know how to cut it with my regular 12.5" ruler -- a 24" hexagon that runs off the upper-right corner, a 24" diamond, and a mid-size parallelogram shape. Another evening of work and I should be able to finish the remaining few shirt segments, then the huge pieces will go together in no time. This is a really fun process, and I think it's shaping up nicely!

Aimee's triangle t-shirt quilt, shaping up!

Neutral Territory

I've had the Fairy Tale Lane quilt by Tula Pink floating around in my head for a while; the quilt as shown in her book is really bright and youthful:

"Fairy Tale Lane" quilt by Tula Pink

What I like most about "modern" quilt designs, including this one, is that they are really showcases for gorgeous modern fabrics. Bonnie Hunter says, "If it's still ugly, you just haven't cut it small enough." In my mind, the flip side of that is true for contemporary fabrics -- if you cut it too small, why bother buying it in the first place?

I like this particular quilt's concept of a village map, so I decided to use the Neutral Territory fabrics -- which I love love love -- to give it a more gritty urban look as opposed to the storybook village. I bought some quarter-yard cuts and added a few Stonehenge prints and some other odds and ends from the Strategic Fabric Reserves to build the blocks. I still have to choose a fabric for the dotted lines in the sashing, but I got the blocks all pieced last night while we watched The Core. NB: I'm a big fan of disaster movies, even bad disaster movies, but this one ... well, suffice it to say I won't be buying the Blu-Ray.

First blocks from my Fairy Tale Lane quilt.

Today is the boys' last day off of school, so I'll use my free time to make the sashing and see how much assembly I can accomplish. I'm sure the top will be finished by the end of the fourth playoff game of the weekend. My other weekend goals include binding the Nevermore runner, finishing another little hex project (photos to follow), and plugging away at the Tangerine Tango quilting.

Honeycomb prep

This Sunday in the Modern Minis class that I've been teaching all year, we're finally getting to the hexagon honeycomb project that's on the book cover. This pattern uses six solids and six prints, so I'm using a length of a fruity-bright P&B Nuances fabric that I bought just for this project:

This fabric is printed with six strips of color running lengthwise, so it's absolutely perfect for this pattern. Instead of buying six separate one-yard cuts, I cut the four yards of my single fabric into six separate 5-1/2" strips. For the skinny background sashing strips, I'm using the rest of my orange squiggly Architextures fabric:

The pattern for the quilt calls for sixty one-inch strips, but I have found that Hartman's patterns tend to be a little on the wasteful side and, since I will have no use for a bunch of leftover one-inch strips, I have decided to cut just 32 strips to get started. I'm sure I'll need a few more, but not 28 more.

After I finished the Week 5 mystery units, I got a nice start on sewing the sashing strips onto the solids and cutting triangles:

The second-darkest segments are all cut (center), and the sashing strips are added to the other four colors. Time to cut triangles!

I worked through the entire set of the darkest shade, along with the coordinating print, and even assembled those half hexagons:

The violet half-hex units are pieced and ready for final assembly.

By the time Sunday rolls around, I should have most of this finished up and ready to assemble. I'm planning to leave just enough of the work unfinished so I can use it as class samples. Still loving all these 60-degree angles!!

Celtic Solstice: Week 5 units

Finished these Week 5 units in the nick of time for the Patriots game (go Pats!), and there's still another seven hours of football/sewing time! Woohoo!

I pieced these the regular rotary way, but I may consider using the special ruler if I ever find myself doing zillions of little triangles again...lots of the other mystery solvers seemed to find it very useful.

Cute little split-triangle units

Running total: 458 + 75 = 533. Maybe one more week of piecing before we start assembling the pieces? The homestretch is so exciting...

Check out the other posts at Bonnie's weekly link-up!

Mommy's new toy

My boys surprised me on Christmas morning with a whomping big triangle ruler, cleverly wrapped so I had no idea what was inside:

"3PO, what can it BE?"

More 60-degree angles!!! I whisked all the Christmas guests out of the house as soon as possible (just kidding, guests, it was a great day!); with the children all nestled snug in their newly restocked Lego and book supplies, and a kitchen full of leftovers, I immediately set to slicing. I took a hiatus for a wedding rehearsal on Thursday evening, and finished piecing these huge simple blocks with only minutes to spare before leaving for the wedding on Friday afternoon. (If you're feeling like hating on me for this insanely fast turnaround time, maybe it will help to know that the blocks aren't sewn together yet -- I'll do that as soon as I can stick them up on a wall for easy rearrangement.)

Chopsticks pattern by Jaybird Quilts.

I plan to use tomorrow, the last football marathon of the season, to whip together this week's mystery quilt units.

Revisiting hexagons

Using a nifty little Fiskars paper punch that makes a hex with a 1" side, I have started wrapping yet another set of hexes, this time using only batiks. It's a great little project to take in the car or to swim meets. I'm just getting started, so this is all I have so far.

1" batik hexes...such a pretty little rainbow!

Another new one!?!

Despite my best intentions of quilting the tops that are waiting upstairs (and a marathon basting session in which I got 5 projects ready to quilt), I still managed to get another new one cut and half pieced this week. The pattern is Avalon by Elizabeth Hartman. I'm going to call this one "Petticoats and Polio" because I don't have a lot of sympathy for false nostalgia.

Two of the four blocks are already finished. I might do a little retro-motif stamping on the solid background, but a variegated quilting thread would fill in the space too. I'll let the possibilities brew for awhile.

This will finish at 60 x 72". (A nice view of the Cloud Nine quilt that I basted yesterday too. I'll post about that one later this week.)

With Halloween eerily looming on the horizon, my sewing machine time will be costume focused for the remainder of the week.

Scrappy Trip

I have been cutting strips for Bonnie Hunter's Scrappy Trip Around the World quilt all summer. I wasn't thinking big when I first started the cutting, but the strips just kept appearing, so at this point I'm anticipating that this will be nearly queen sized. I have the first 11 blocks done:

Scrappy Trip Around the World: A first look

Ravens begun

A friend of mine who is a serious fan of all things "raven" (it is hoped that this fandom doesn't extend to a certain NFL team from Baltimore...) commissioned me to make a table topper after she saw the Nevermore fabric that I used to make my sister a table runner earlier this summer. I showed her a few different concepts with hexagons and pinwheels that might work on her round table, but we settled on the decagon pattern that I bought at one of the Newington Schoolhouse meetings last year. I couldn't resist this nifty ruler set -- I love that it has pieces with 72 and 36-degree angles. (Stars! Decagons! So many geometrical delights!)

I bought the raven fabric this weekend, got it all washed and ironed, set to cutting...and realized that I miscounted the repeat...so, sadly, another stop at the quilt shop will need to be in my immediate future. (What a bummer.) In the meantime, the pieces that I do have look spectacular in the round:

If only this mathematically inclined quilter could count...

Frosty fun

One week until the GHQG Quilt Show, and I have blown through my To-Do list with five days to spare...reminder postcards have been mailed, show programs and fall newsletter are both at the printer, all of my quilts (even the hexagons) are finished, labels are printed so I can sew them on tomorrow...I seem to be ready for The Big Event!!

I spent a few hours of my unexpected free time cooling off with some adorable wintry prints. I adore this red-and-grey combination for the holiday season; very festive and contemporary. The goofy raccoon and squirrel sold me on the animals panel, and for once I actually bought coordinates from the same fabric line, although I confess that the slightly darker red borders came from the Strategic Fabric Reserves in my closet. I'm going to do some feather quilting in the red triangle shapes, some basic outlining in the block borders, and something straight-line based in the grey background...but not until after the show. Only 146 days until Winter!

"Grand Opening" pattern by Maple Island Quilts

The panel came with seven more squares, but I have some other table-related plans for those, also in queue for the After-Show epoch.

"Clearing the Decks": Part II

Despite my best intentions, the process of making this quilt got in the way of documentation, so I don't have a lot of in-progress pictures (sorry, Lynn!). Also, my left brain wouldn't cede control, so I ended up with a thoroughly unintelligible sheet of graph paper to make sure everything would fit together in the end. I so much prefer working like a jigsaw puzzle to make the available pieces fit into a final known shape, rather than creating a shape that is undetermined. Anyway, here's the top, minus the borders that are already cut and ready to assemble. I'm going to put a 2" strip of white around this, then a split rail arrangement of 2.5 x 5" bricks to border the whole thing (and use up the precut bricks).

I cleared out two plastic bins AND a bag in making this. This quilt incorporates:

• the scrappy rectangles made from 3" pink, green, and red squares (leftmost column)
• seven unassembled 12" blocks (top and right)
• all the 2" squares that I had (second column), including a leftover block from a Modern Patchwork Roller Rink table runner
• 22 6" blocks (third column and bottom row), some made for the rainbow scrap challenge, 2 from a previous Newington Schoolhouse Quilters mystery quilt, and 2 practice paper pieced palm blocks
• Some leftover 1" squares, already sewed into strips during my Sol Lewitt phase (located along the left edge of the vertical column of six" blocks in the center portion)
• a five" block (incorporated into the border of bricks, because that's where it fit)
• the tumblers and half-rectangle triangles that I cut on the Accucut last January
• the leftover strip of selvedges combined with a few pre-cut bricks

Hurray for cleaning house!

"Clearing the Decks" Quilt

I had a really fun and convivial day at Lisa's Clover Hill today chatting with the ladies and working on assorted little projects. I realized that I don't really have a particular big project that I'm working on right now, so it's hard to pack something up to go out for the day. What I decided on last night is to use up all the little bits and orphan pieces that have been sitting in various bins for embarrassing lengths of time. At my friend Lynn's request, I'll do my best to document my progress and thoughts as I work through this project.

This is really the first time I have worked in such a free-form way. Kitty, another friend from the shop, seemed surprised by that, but it's true: I'm an absolute slave to patterns and precision. The patterns are frequently of my own design, but I like to have an idea of where I'm going. My idea of being free-form is to not fuss too much about a zillionth of an inch of a point getting cut off, maybe to stretch pieces a little to fit and sometimes to rely on "quilting it out" in the end. For this, I'm trying my hardest to leave those worries by the wayside. We'll see how that goes, if my right brain can assert any kind of dominance over my left.

Here are a few photos of my first day of collecting bits and pieces, and some preliminary stitching. For the rest of the evening, I'll be tracking down various orphan blocks that are hiding all over the place and figuring out what to do with them.

I have a four or five-inch wide strip of selvage strips, leftover from the bolster pillow, that I might use.

I have three 12x24" blocks that I made when I was being very virtuous about the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. Although that fell by the wayside in my life this year, this project seems like a good way to use up the few pieces that I did complete (red, pink and green). I thought I had blue and purple ones somewhere; I'll check upstairs in the UFO bin later when I tuck the boys in.

These strips are from the small scraps that I cut last January using Lisa's big Accucut machine. I'm never going to cut more tumblers or half-rectangle triangles...might as well throw 'em in the mix! There's also a row of 2" squares in the middle of the wall in this photo, and some 2.5 x 5" bricks that I started piecing  like a split rail. 

A few dresden flowers from the early months of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge might make their way into this quilt as well.

I also have a set of nine red and nine green 6" squares. I'll work these in too.

At first, I was envisioning a very minimalist, small-pieces, scrappy quilt with a "modern" (i.e., lots of white space) look, kind of like a bar graph with every bar made from different shapes or sizes. I don't relish the idea of cutting a zillion more tiny scraps on the machine, though; using up what I already cut is the whole point. So, now I'm thinking more of a complete mishmash, but I'll spend a day or two trying to figure out how to strike a balance between the big blocks and the tiny bits. Progress report complete.