Vertical Quilting Curve

Sorry, faithful readers, if there are any after my long absence…. I’m going to have to quit blogging here. I just don’t have the time to add One More Stressor to my life.

Thanks, and have fun creating!

When I was pregnant with my first child, people liked to say to me, “Enjoy that while you can, because once that baby gets here, you won’t have time to …….” whatever it was I was doing that they had decided I wouldn’t have time to do anymore.

There was one particular naysayer who used to say it a LOT. And 2002 was the year that I took up quilting again, and she said it several times to me that year — that I wouldn’t have time for quilting anymore after “that baby” got here. I said to her finally, “If it were really that bad, why on earth did you have two more after the first one?” She didn’t say it again.

And I quilted after Helen was born probably a lot more than I would have… perhaps a bit out of rebellion.

And I’m still enjoying it while I can.

I’ll resume my feverish posting pace (ha!) When the Stomach Virus Has Left the Building.

Currently it has a deathgrip on our family. Which means I don’t have much time for things other than Laundry, Lysol, and Loving on my two sick little girls.

I’m working on a quilt like this one (have been since June), and I have 13 blocks (out of 36) remaining to make.

Being the math geek that I am, I figured out that I need to make 27 more arcs and then I’ll have enough to complete my 36 blocks to my satisfaction. Not too shabby, really, considering I’ve put together 14 arcs in the past 10 days. I might actually finish this behemoth yet!

Photos will be posted… maybe tomorrow when I have a bit more time to resize and upload them.

I was going to TRY to work on something today when the girls napped. But they did not nap. See previous post about new mattress set arriving; the girls were WAY too excited to be expected to sleep. Alice did pass out for 30 minutes on the floor of the playroom, but that’s it. Helen was awake, and I was afraid she’d step on her sister and wake her up, so I had to bring her up to the sewing room. Which meant that I got NOTHING done because I had to referee the 4-year-old away from forbidden things the whole time.

Maybe tomorrow?

Alice’s mattress set arrived today, so I was finally able to put her quilt on a bed. It looks good!

Between projects, I mean?

Or are you inspired by the little piles of color around you and keep working, like I do, until the functional space on your worktable is so small that you are FORCED to clean up?

Why do I do this to myself? I MUST clean up soon, because I have about an 8″x10″ area of space on which to cut my 1/4″ seams on my paper foundation piecing.

Gotta fix that… I need more space! LOL!

I discovered this little beauty in the quilt shop a few months ago: Groovin’ Piping Trimming Tool.

If you like the finished look of piping as much as I do, but dread lining it up neatly to make a perfect seam, THIS IS THE TOOL FOR YOU.

Admittedly, I have a sort of piping obsession. It’s not healthy and I know that. But WOW. What a difference this tool makes with my speed and accuracy! Now I get a PERFECT 1/4″ seam allowance, and no more raggedy edges to approximate as I sew it to the next layer! This will be fantastic for making children’s clothing, too — on the other side is a groove for perfect 1/2″ seam allowances. Wheee!

I’m a happy seamstress.

I took a class this fall on Shifting Perspectives. Mostly it appealed to me because of the mathematics, but I also liked the idea of designing the entire quilt all by myself.

At our first class, we designed our own blocks and determined the size of my shift. I chose a 12″ block that I would shift three times in each direction, thus making 16 blocks total. I chose fabrics that night, and took them home to wash and prepare them. The next week we came back and cut the odd-shaped pieces for one or two blocks, with supervision (this is the trickiest part). Then we had several weeks to make all of our blocks before coming back to cut (the second trickiest part, and definitely the most nervewracking) and shift them.

Here are my 16 blocks, unshifted.

Then I started messing with the uncut blocks, trying to determine if I wanted to cut them at all. They did arrange into some pretty neat configurations:

Then I started cutting and shifting the blocks. This involved cutting a specified amount off the right side of all the left-column blocks, and that same amount off the bottom of all the top row blocks. And then shifting the cutting amount down and right as you progressed through the 16 blocks. Easier to DO than explain, but anyway.

Here are my 16 blocks, shifted and cut, but not sewn…

And sewn:

Then I used the cuttings from the “shifts” to create a border for the quilt:

It’s not very big…. Maybe about 38″x48″ if even that much. The interior blocks finished out at 7.5″ wide, so the center section was only 30″ square when I was done.

Kinda weird. Makes me think of Prismacolor pencils. I had fun doing it, though!

For a Christmas Gift from my mom, I have asked for the enrollment fee for a class at Quilt University. Mom has taken two classes through their programs (the Filament Fantasy and Realistic Fabric Portraits classes), and done some of her most successful art quilts with her new knowledge.

At this point, the ones that appeal to me most are this one (because of the mathematics) and this one (because I want to learn more about surface embellishment techniques) and this one (because I have the software and don’t use it enough — and I should, because it’s really great software).

Hmmmmmmm….