Month: June 2020

I spent my quilting time this week getting this project done—just the top and the back prepped for staging on the frame. I think I will need to get batting and I wouldn’t just order that online without actually seeing it and feeling it. A poor quality batting will take all the pleasure out of finishing the project. Staging it will wait until the nights come earlier in the evening—sometime in September, fitted in between the harvesting and  winter planting.

Robbie loves this quilt and wants it for his study so the pleasure of quilting it is doubled. I’ve always felt like that about finishing my projects. It’s as if making the patchwork top is an exciting creative puzzle. The magic happens on the ironing board as I press the seams of the fabrics I have just sewn together creating a new and different patterned fabric. I’ve been known to stay up late into the wee hours of the morning working on putting blocks together, watching the magic happen at the ironing board—the kaleidoscope of color and shape changing under my hands as each block and row come together. It’s a bit like gardening, putting flowers and plants together in colorful combinations that, thanks to mother nature, are not the same as any other garden bed in the world. But patchwork is so much quicker!!

But putting the whole thing together and finishing it requires the intentionality of “gift” for energy—who is it FOR. If there’s no one, the project tends to languish in the UFO box… Un-Finished Objects.

I’m going to use the same Traveler ‘Round the World method to do a quilt I promised to my grandniece Ella two years ago when I was quilting a baby quilt for my neighbors’ new baby, Emma. I’ve been thinking about it a good deal and even ordered a couple of yards of fabric that might complement what I already have. It will be a smaller quilt — a bed topper or something to wrap up in while reading a book or watching TV. I’ll start that in a couple of weeks.

For now, I’m going to use the strips of fabric I have left from this quilt top to make a table runner. I’ve been musing about it all along… and I can use some scrap batting for it. I’m excited about it and will have itchy fingers unwilling to wait for a rainy day to work on it. I might even start today!

At the same time as folks have been making 9-Patch quilt blocks and reusable face coverings, I’ve also been messing with the mountain of fabric scraps and remnants I have, putting together a fun scrap quilt based on the Traveler Round the World pattern. Instead of using the same eight fabrics throughout, I based the fabric choices on the shades, from light to dark, of basic colors (black, blue, violet, brown, red, orange, yellow, white). The piece didn’t need t be all of that color, but rather contain something of that color in the fabric — and maybe a little of its contiguous colors. The result has been startling and quite harmonious. I’m nearly done the blocks and am trying to decide how the layout from the central diamond will go. Leaning toward “barn raising”.

Here’s what that would look like (based on tessellating an image of one block)

Problem is I only planned for 32 blocks — don’t know why. So now I have to go back through the scraps and find four more blocks worth of strips. Happy days!