Monday, January 31, 2011

Mini Tokyo Subway Map Quilt-Along - Block 7 / Serendipity

 
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See how the 6th row from the top is all orange, except for the last square on the right, which is dark blue, but says "Orange?" Total coincidence. I've got the cut-out squares in plastic glasses, and when I pick them for each block, I try to get a variety of tones, styles, scales, etc., but that's about it for planning. I just happened to grab the blue "orange" when I was looking for another dark blue.

Why does the fabric say "orange"? It's a cute novelty design with various images of coffee-related objects and the names of various coffee drinks in script. "Orange" was part of the phrase "Seville Orange," which I didn't realize was a coffee drink, but no complaints here.

(Don't worry, I also did Blocks 4, 5, & 6, I just need to play catch-up for them.)

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Scraphappy Saturday

Inspired partly by Anita Grossman Solomon's Make It Simpler Paper Piecing and partly by soscrappy's Rainbow Scrap Challenge, I've been working on these for the last week or so, but I'm just getting around to posting/sharing them now. (Also inspired by having a metric buttload of blue scraps.)

See what other folks have been up to here.

Scrappy Spiral Diamond in the Star Eight-Point Star
Evening Star Mother's Dream Pinwheel Star

Hot off the presses!

 
Lookit what I made! (More details later -- off to buy more fabric before LQS closes.)
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Thursday, January 27, 2011

Linky-Poo

Boy howdy, do I love these black-and-white blocks! Perfect blend of modern & traditional. RETRO-Fabulous: RSVP Designs.

This too, also fabulous: i'm a ginger monkey: 80's Bat Wing Sweater (Courtesy of Modern Day Quilts)

Friday, January 21, 2011

"But don't let the perfect be the enemy of the tasty"

I love Francis Lam's food writing, so I'm happy to link to his article about making homemade stock, but really, it was the subhead that caught my eye here.

Mini Tokyo Subway Map Quilt-Along - Block 3

I sewed it up Wednesday night, and here it is:


I'm really enjoying this project.  Now that I've done a couple of blocks, Terrie Sandelin's technique is pretty painless, and seeing all the little charms neatly lined up just makes me smile.

Laugh-Out-Loud Cats #1600

I was racking my brain trying to figure out how to describe the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats comic strip (which is not the same thing as the LOLCats captioned photos), so I did a web search.  Whaddya know, Wikipedia comes through again:
Laugh-Out-Loud Cats is a series of cartoons created by Adam "Ape Lad" Koford that features two anthropomorphic hobo cats named Kitteh and Pip. The series consists of mostly single-panel cartoons that combine internet memes associated with LOLcats (from which the series takes its name) and other forms of internet slang and contemporary humor with a visual style that pays homage to early 20th century comic strips such as Krazy Kat.
Anyway, that long build-up was just to point you to the 1600th strip (the creator usually does something special for the big round numbers), which is super-duper awesome.  You may need to read it a couple of times to get the whole time-space continuum thing that's happening (I did, anyway).

Monday, January 17, 2011

Mini Tokyo Subway Map Quilt-Along - Block 1

I'm joining Oh Fransson's Tokyo Subway Map Quilt-Along (a little late, but what else is new), only I've scaled it down using Terrie Sandelin's phenominally awesome paper-piecing method shown in Miniatures in Minutes, so that the individual patches are 3/4" inch finished, and the finished blocks will be 6".

It took me a while to cut out all the scraps, including some time to accumulate more in some colors, e.g., red, and print some fabric using BubbleJetSet & my home printer, e.g., gray and yellow.  I also spent time creating the paper foundation patterns, but finally tonight, I sat down and made the first block.

Ta da!