flying, dancing, fluttering geese

Are y'all getting tired of hearing about my adventures in flying geese blocks yet? I hope not, cause I've got some more for ya. At least this time I have something other than stacks of fabric to show!

I was up early this morning and got some sewing done. Actually, I was up late. To be even more precise, I'm still up late. Insomnia won last night, and I didn't sleep a wink — not for lack of trying. So please forgive this overly perky, stream-of-consciousness sporadic post. I'm running on Red Bull fumes at this point.

Since I just happened to be taking photos while the sun was still up (doesn't happen often!), I tried taking them outside. But they tried to fly away. So here's a picture from my ironing board, shoddy point-and-shoot flash and all:

I wish I had more to show for my all-nighter, but I ran out of thread! I sewed up three columns of geese, each one measuring about 68 inches. (They're taller than I am!) I probably could have gotten part of another column pieced, but I'm completely addicted to chain-piecing and I can't stop mid-chain to run out and buy thread. So three it is.

The good news is the columns are coming together rather quickly. I have two more columns of geese and four columns of coins. Oh, and the ridiculous border I decided to make out of 2-inch squares. I was pressing seams thinking "I can totally have this ready for the Bloggers Quilt Festival," when I remembered the border. Then I burned my wrist on the iron. I'm hoping the border comes together surprisingly quickly like the columns have been so far.

This is totally unrelated, but few people I know in real life would truly appreciate this awesome table. I was out having a beer with my roommate and just had to take a picture of this. (By the way, Don Draper drinks High Life. I finally watched the season finale during my sleepless night.) I can't wait to sketch something on graph paper! I think this needs to become something Christmasy...

ps: This post is linked up with Fabric Tuesday at the Quilt Story blog. If you like fabric, check it out!

impulse shopping leads to impulse sewing

I was naughty toward the end of August. I had already overspent on fabric, but when a Botany jelly roll showed up as the Quilter's Daily Deal for only $22 plus $5 flat-rate shipping, I really just had to have it. I couldn't really afford it, but it was a really good deal!

Anyway, while sitting on my couch Friday drinking coffee after waking up a good four hours earlier than usual, I decided to be as impulsive in using the jelly roll as I was in buying it.

I took inspiration (and some basic construction info) from this Moda Bake Shop tutorial and this doll quilt on Flickr.

I originally wanted to lay out my blocks like this:

But I didn't like it as much after laying it all out. The decision was made for me when I realized that the way I squared up my blocks meant that some of the seams would be impossible to line up using this layout.

So I played some more and wound up with this:

I'm much happier with this layout. I think the values work way better, and it's easier to see the effect. My roommate helped me brainstorm the top and bottom border.

One of my favorite parts about this quilt top is that it cost less than $30! That's pretty incredible. I think I'm going to bind it in the brown print I used for the ¾" mini-border between the blocks and the piano keys. Thoughts?

ps: Sorry for the less-than-stellar pictures. My camera has been acting funky, so I'm using my cell phone for the time being.

the alt-quilter

I can't tell you how excited I was to open the New York Times Thursday Homes section and see a good portion of a page dedicated to a modern/contemporary quilter. Let me just say it's a good thing newspapers put most of their content online these days, because the page was in black and white!

The article was really just a brief Q&A with a Seattle-based, metal-head quilter, Boo Davis. The Web version of the article refers to Boo as an "alt-quilter." I wonder, though, if this is how she sees herself. I googled the phrase and found next to no results — interesting with all the hubbub in the quilt-blogger community over whether we're "modern" quilters or "contemporary" quilters or something else entirely. I just call myself a "quliter."

In the article, Boo Davis talks about the evolution of her book from a "hard-edged, metal-infused guide to quilting" to a book of patterns that "skew more cute than evil." This girl quit her job, took out a loan and spent three months in her condo (which she calls her "hoven") cranking out her book, "Dare to Be Square Quilting." Despite the fact that the end product wasn't what she set out to make, she says she's happy with the results. On changing the attitude of the book, Boo says: "Craft books are a pretty expensive endeavor, and you want to make sure they will sell." I think I might pick it up just for the cute owl quilt on the cover!

Among Boo's other repeatable quotes from the article:

The appeal of quilts is that they are usable pieces of art. To me, when a quilt ceases to be cozy or if it’s so precious it has to be stuck on a wall, it’s not of interest anymore. Anything outside of classic cotton, that’s just crazy to me.

I just want to say that it’s extremely upsetting to see quilts and patchwork projects being sold for next to nothing on Etsy. You’ll see these elaborate, queen-size quilts for $300. That’s pennies an hour. So much of a person goes into a quilt. It’s an artistic labor of love that deserves respect. I think the quilt makers of the world need to rise up and start throwing elbows.

Sing it! I myself have never sold a quilt, but the thought has entered my mind, and then promptly leaves when it comes to pricing. To those of you who sell quilts, how do you determine price? Do you feel adequately compensated? And to my non-quilty friends: What would you expect to pay for a handmade quilt? Were you shocked that $300 for a queen-sized quilt is "pennies an hour," as Boo points out above?

NOTE: This article is in the Aug. 12 edition. The New York Times gallery has more great photos of Boo's quilts, as does her website.

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ps: Thanks for the tips on my design delimma! I'm still mulling over the options and waiting for my test-cuts of sashing fabric to come in the mail, so keep the opinions/advice coming! Also, I'm in the midst of a blog redesign, so if you click over and things look crazy, don't worry, it's all part of the process!

design help?

I've been in the process of designing something for my Fandango jelly roll. I got the "craving" for a jelly roll after seeing Aneela's quilt at Comfort Stitching. I've been wanting to do something with flying geese for a while, and the other night while perusing the Fresh Modern Quilts Flickr group, I found myself being drawn to stacked coins quilts, too.

I designed a geese and coins quilt that could be made with a jelly roll and some background fabric. I really love the problem-solving that comes with pre-cut fabrics — how many 4½" strips can you get from a jelly roll? It's fun to play with the math and try different ideas, maybe a border or make it taller and thinner or wider and shorter? There seem to be two types of quilters: those who love the math and geometry of it, and those who hate it. I am definitely the former! As such, I have a hard time playing around with color — I always try to make it mathematical in some way. For example, my Fandango jelly roll has 18 blue/aqua strips, 13 red-orange/pink strips, 3 yellow strips, 3 mostly cream strips, and 3 brown strips. A pre-cut is like a puzzle to me, and it's so fun to solve! Does anyone else do this? Or am I just crazy? :)

OK, so this is where I need your help:

Now that I've counted the colors/values, I need to decide how I want to play the color values in the quilt. I could do columns of geese in particular colorways, and have the coins be a mash-up of sorts, like this:

Or, I could make all my geese be my cooler colors, and have the coins be warmer tones:

I could also have warm-colored geese and cool-colored coins. ("Warm geese and cool coins" has a ring to it, no?) Or I could do a kind of gradient from cool to warm across, like this cool stacked coins quilt ... The possibilities go on, those are just the ones I made up in inDesign last night. I'm also hoping to avoid using white sashing, because I think the prints on creamy backgrounds will get lost, and also because I don't have much experience playing with different background/sashing colors. I really want to try using a darker background, possibly with a different texture to it. I ordered a few small cuts of quilters linen, moda crossweave and kaffe shot cotton so I could see and feel the textures and test some different colors. (I'm not telling yet which colors I got, because I want unbiased advice!)

What would you do, color-wise? What color/type of background fabric would you use? Any other thoughts/advice/questions?

A quilter who doesn't have a quilt on her bed?

Yes, I'm that girl — a quilter without a quilt on her bed. It's not that I'm overwhelmed by making a queen-size quilt or anything like that. I just really love my fluffy down comforter! I love the look of quilts on beds, but I just don't like the feeling of sleeping under one. I know, I'm crazy! Anyway, I have a store-bought duvet cover, but I couldn't sleep last night and decided one of my next "big" projects will be making a patchwork duvet cover. It will be "quilted" in the sense that I'll back it with muslin or something like that, but no batting. I stayed up for hours looking through magazines and Flickr groups for inspiration. Of course I found an overwhelming amount! Here are some of my favorites:

1. shade garden quilt, 2. Playing with the Boys Quilt, 3. Halloween Quilt, 4. Flying Geese Quilt, 5. geese in the city, 6. finished!, 7. Arcadia, 8. playpen quilt 006, 9. Jakob's quilt, 10. Funky Quilt Squares, 11. Basted - Front, 12. Dick And Jane Quilt

As you can see, I have a lot of narrowing down to do! I want to try to avoid anything with too much white (cause I'm lazy and don't want to wash it too often, ha!), and something that will go well with my black bed frame. I'm thinking lots of bright, bold colors...

I think I'll also make a "real" quilt to hang on the footboard and move to the bed during the winter months to keep my feet nice and toasty at night. Now I just have to decide on a pattern and figure out what colors I want to go with! (My room is kind of a blank slate once you take the duvet I'm using now out of the picture.)

I won't be able to start this project for a while (lots of time to let ideas marinate!), because I really want to try out a voile or cotton lawn to get a nice feel and easy drape. These tend to be a bit more expensive, but it'll be worth saving for. I've never worked with anything but a mid-weight cotton before, so I'd love to hear any tips on working with lighter fabrics.

Today was the deadline in Amy's One Thing, One Week Challenge. I haven't 100% finished the secret wall-hanging yet, but I did finish quilting and attaching the binding to the front. It's about 28" square, so I'm holding out hope that I might finish at some point tonight. Pictures to come as soon as it lands at its new home :)

Crafty A.D.D.

I feel like I've had crafty A.D.D. lately. I get to a mid-point with a project and then just completely switch gears! Does this happen to you? I was so psyched about my hexagon QAL quilt, but I keep finding ways to put off basting and quilting it. Though I did finish one of my distraction-projects last night:

This started a week or so ago. I came home from work one night and thought "I finally want to do something with that cute robot fat quarter I won a while back." So I started putting together a haphazard log cabin block. (Side note, I think I'm liking "haphazard" better than "wonky." Thoughts?) I was planning to make a small wall hanging, but then I remembered I had a naked pillow form in my closet, and it just grew from there.

Here's a close-up of the quilting. It took a while, but I really like the effect. I just quilted straight lines within each "log." And since it's a pillowcase, I didn't have to hide the thread ends, I just pulled them to the back, tied them off and trimmed them. Gotta love that!

I was walking home from work last night and the craziest thought popped into my head: "I'm craving a jelly roll." For those non-quilters reading, no I was not craving a pastry. I was craving a lovely roll-up of 42 2½"x44" strips of beautiful fabric. I think a huge part of the reason is that I kept coming back to stare at this beautiful patchwork table covering that Aneela at Comfort Stitching made with just a jelly roll and some background fabric.

I ended up ordering a Fandango jelly roll from Piece N Quilt. Natalia is de-stashing and has a few bundles of 10 fat quarters that she's selling for only $15 (that's only $6/yard)! I had to pick up one of those, too, of course!

So no more shopping for me for a while, but at least I have a billion projects to work on in the mean time. I just need to work up the motivation to quilt some stuff that's already pieced. The quilting is definitely one of my least-favorite parts of the process. Encouragement in the comments is always greatly appreciated :) How do you power through your least favorite part of the process?

Musings on Inspiration

These are just a few things that have been inspiring me lately.
(Clockwise from left: a colorful trace I made of a sketch a friend drew;
the Austin skyline; and a shot of something I saw in the background on TV)

I've been thinking a lot lately about inspiration. First of all, there are many different kinds. There's the inspiration to create a design from scratch, the inspiration to modify a traditional pattern, the inspiration to just simply make something you've seen someone else make. The idea of starting from scratch has always left me dumbfounded. How do you start with a piece of blank paper and sketch out a beautiful quilt? Furthermore, how do you take something you see in real life and translate it to the language of quilt? It's always really overwhelmed me, to the point where I had almost resigned myself to simply re-creating others' designs.

But that seemed boring. Well, maybe boring isn't the best word... defeatist? Yes, I was throwing in the towel. Figuring out the math is one of my favorite parts of the process. Wouldn't it be even more fun if it were my design? Still, the idea of a blank sheet of paper and a pencil in my hand unnerves me.

I've been following the City Quilts Blog Tour, and on Monday I came across a blog post that floored me. Cheryl, who hosted the first stop on the blog tour, had a link on her sidebar titled "Modern Quilting — A Throwback." Well of course I had to check it out. Actually, you should, too! Cheryl writes about an antique quilts room in a quilt show she attended. It dawned on Cheryl that modern quilting really isn't so modern at all. Modern quilting is, in fact, traditional quilting, she says.

It's like the title of that Kaffe Fassett book Simple Shapes, Spectacular Quils. The idea is not new.

As I was reading Cheryl's post, I found that she managed to put into words many ideas that had been forming in the far reaches of the back of my mind for months. And then, of course, that old Barenaked Ladies song popped into my head: "It's all been done; it's all been done; it's all been done before." (Hey, I was in junior high when that song came out, so it's not lame that I know it so well...)

This took the stress away for me. It's all about putting my own touches on a design that speaks to me. What I need to do is not copy the pictures of quilts I love, but jump off from the idea and make it my own. That I think I can do :)

I spent more than an hour last night clicking through the 1,000+ images in the Amish Country Lanes online quilt tour, and I came up with quite a few ideas! (I would love to share them with you now, but this post is already long and text-heavy, so I'll wait until I have some sketches or InDesign mock-ups to show.)

I really want to know where your ideas come from. Do you prefer to follow patterns? If so, do you follow them to the letter or modify them a bit? Do you buy fabric to fit your pattern, or pick a pattern to fit your fabric? Do you write your own patterns? If so, where do the ideas come from?

What's the best idea you think you've had lately?

Bee blocks

So it occurred to me that I've yet to show you guys the blocks I've been making for my Virtual Quilting Bee (VQB), the Bee in my Bonnet. So here's a little wrap-up of what I've contributed to our first quarter...

Deanna was nice/brave enough to volunteer to go first, and got us kicked off in May with string blocks:

We used a white square for the foundation, rather than paper, and they came out really well. Deanna's actually pretty close to having the quilt top put together, and I can't wait to see it!

Then, for June, Kelly requested some wonky log cabin blocks. I dug some out of my stash to make two blocks for her:

This was my first time making anything wonky, and you can tell how my first block (on the left) turned out more straight than wonky! But I think the different degrees of wonkiness will play off each other well in Kelly's finished quilt.

For July, Candi gave us some lovely open-ended instructions: right angles, no wonkiness please. She also had a beautiful array of fabrics. So I perused the Quilting Bee Blocks Flickr group, and found some glorious inspiration. I followed the tutorial at Little Miss Shabby and cut what seemed like a billion 1½" squares. I "sketched" out my designs (using computer-generated graph paper, a sharpie, and some highlighers) and laid out all the teeny pieces on my new, big table. Each block took about three hours, but I am so happy with how they turned out:

It's going to take all my willpower to take these to the post office tomorrow :)

I love how each month I get to learn something new or try a new technique. If you're interested in joining a VQB, check out the Quilting Bees 101 page of the Quilting Bee Blocks blog. There's also a link from the blog to their fabulous Flickr group, which is just teeming with inspiration.

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This is entirely unrelated, but I finally figured out how I want to piece the back of my Hexagon QAL quilt, and it's left me with an untouched layer cake of Glam Garden. I love this fabric line, but I'm currently at a loss as to what to do with the layer cake. What would you make with it?

I have a confession to make...

I touched my sewing machine today for the first time in almost three weeks. Last night I was talking with a good friend of mine who does beautiful oil paintings, and sells a bunch of them around Central Texas. I told him what I hadn't really told anyone else until now: that I hadn't sewn in weeks. My friend simply said, "Well you probably should." Then we talked about the creative process and hitting road blocks, and I realized I had burnt out somewhere in May. I have a hard time achieving balance in my life sometimes, and I spent far too much time only quilting and going to work. It kind of takes the joy out of it and makes it feel like a chore. But...

(Sorry for the bad picture, I took it on my phone cause I misplace my real camera. I promise better pictures of the finished product later!)

... today I turned on the iron, busted out my rotary cutter and finally got to something I had been wanting to do for a while. After talking with my friend last night, I decided I needed something quick and easy to work on to get me back in the groove. This mini quilt has been in my Flickr favorites for a while, and I've had a sketch on graph paper pinned on the wall above my sewing machine for far too long. I also have a nasty empty spot staring at me from above my TV. I put together the top (front?) of this wall hanging and basted it this afternoon before work. The best part is I didn't have to buy a thing. I had just enough leftover white Kona from the Potholder Pass (well almost — do you see the seam in the bottom right square?), and the back will just be muslin since it'll be against the wall anyway.

But I need some advice: First, I'm dying to hear any tips on making and attaching a wall-hanging sleeve that won't show. Second, I'd really love to hear what you do to pull yourself out of a funk, or how you deal with that burnt-out roadblock feeling.

Spring to Finish Challenge halfway check-in

(more on this later)

Yesterday was the half-way point for the Spring to Finish Challenge. So far, I've checked four things off my list... six to go — yipes. I think I may modify my list... I don't want to rush through the quilting on the Pinwheel Sampler, so my new goal is to have the top assembled by May 31. That's not cheating too much, right?

My family came to Austin on Sunday for Mother's Day since I had to work that night (oh the joys of working in a 24/7/365 business). My brother came a little early so we could get the garden tote all filled with goodies:

Our mom loved it! We went to the park to see a play by a local theater group called Austin Shakespeare. They put on a play in the park each year, and they had a special Mother's Day matinee. When you're part of a huge group of people picnicing, you're going to see quite a few quilts:

I really liked how these two huge quilts matched. I couldn't get close enough to see if they were "real" quilts or the mass-manufactured ones you can buy at a home decor place. My family used a quilt that my mom's step-grandmother had given her for her high-school graduation. We've used this thing for picnics my entire life. It has definitely seen better days.

I realized this weekend that it's entirely hand-pieced and hand-quilted. Wow. The reason I could tell it was hand-pieced is that some of the stitches are coming open. My mom said she wants me to take it apart and fix it someday. The key word there is someday... :)



I'm loving this nautical print. I wish I knew more about the fabrics. I wonder if they were leftover scraps, or if they were meant for the quilt. I'm leaning toward leftover scraps, but I guess I'll never really know.

Do you have any heirloom quilts in your family?

Inspiration from Flickr

It's been a few days. I haven't posted because I haven't gotten anything done since the Friday Night Sew-In. I've been taking care of a sick boyfriend and a sick puppy with my free time this week. I have about 8 days until I can buy more fabric and thread, so I need to make do with what I have. But I have been practically drooling over the Modify Tradition blog and Flickr pool. These are a few of my favorites:

(each photo is a link to the Flickr page, hover or click over for details)

I've been doing some online window-shopping for a FQ bundle or layer cake, because I am absolutely dying to make my very own Modify Tradition-inspired sampler quilt. They're doing a quilt-along over there, but I think I want to do this at my own pace. I'm already behind on Rachel's pinwheel sampler — I caught up for all of one day!

So here is my to-do list before I can buy more fabric. Hopefully posting it here will keep me accountable...

1. pinwheel sampler quilt-along block five
2. put together backing for Happy Campers
3. baste Happy Campers
4. work on sashing for whirlygigs
5. get paid

The last item on that list is probably the most important :)

In sale news: QuiltHome is giving 20% off Valori Wells fabric, patterns and books through March 29 with the code vwf20.

Fabric.com is giving an extra 30% off sale (which is already 30%-50% off) through March 29 with code CLEARANCE323.

ps: I am also completely addicted to the Fresh Modern Quilts Flickr pool. Inspiration city.