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Quick, how old would you say this is?

For the answer, check out Quilt Inspiration.


Doesn't it look just like one of these?



Blows my mind.

Whoa. Just, Whoa.

I take back every negative thing I ever said or thought about wonky quilts. On The Design Wall posted pictures of Eleanor McCain's quilts. I have no words.

You must go & check out her site. Everything there is mind-blowingly amazing. (Or amazingly mind-blowing. Or both.)

I made a wonky quilt, and it was OK*

So, as you may have guessed, I'm kind of a left-brained square-peg-in-a-square-hole kind of quilter. I do sometimes like other people's liberated/wonky/improvised quilts, but overall, they don't really speak to me.

However, while I'm happy with all the nice pieced blocks I've been making lately, I was kind of craving a project that I could finish (quickly!) and be able to say, "look, I made a quilt" rather than just "look, I made a block." So I decided to give Oh, Fransson's Crazy Nine-Patch Lattice Quilt a try.



It's scaled down because the fabric I had was fat eighths, rather than quarters, and because I wasn't sure if I would like it, so the finished size is only about 29" square. As it was going together, I was pretty unsure of how well I like it, but now that the top is done, I'm actually quite fond of it. Of course, the fabric helps with that -- I love those 30's repro fabrics.

I've got the backing fabric soaking in starch water in the refrigerator (a tip from Anita Grossman Solomon; we'll see how it works), so all I need to do is find the courage to try to quilt it at home. Perhaps I'll do that tonight, or later this week. I'm thinking of a simple "drop diamond" design, or whatever it's called when there are evenly spaced vertical lines that are intersected by evenly spaced 45° diagonals.

Anyway, Look! I made a quilt top!

* apologies to Scott Dikkers

Block Party #3: Wonky & Straight go the full 12 rounds!

 

The block is "Pieced Raimon (Spiral)" from Susan Briscoe's Japanese Quilt Blocks to Mix and Match (a book I just love!), scaled down a smidge to 8" finished and paper-pieced. Structurally, it's a plain old Courthouse Steps, although it looks more exotic because of the fabric layout. The red check is printed on the square, so I sliced the strips at varying angles for each round to force some contrast between the regularity of the block and the created wonkiness of the fabric.

This is actually the third version of this block I've made. The first one was a scrappy "proof of concept", and I meant the second to be my entry, but I just didn't love it (I'll post a pic of that one separately so as not to confuse the entry.) I found some nice oriental fabric, and a solid that coordinated, but somehow, it wasn't grabbing me. I'm still not sure why -- need to ponder some more on that.

Block Party #2 - Black & White

I went back and forth on whether to put this in the Traditional or Modern category, but ultimately picked modern due to the color scheme and also because the block is my own design. It's definitely traditional-looking, but I haven't seen it anywhere else, so I'm planting a flag in the ground & calling it "Cathy's Toad", since it's sort of a cross between "Cathy's Campfire" and "Toad in the Puddle."

Paper-pieced, 6" finished.

Scrappy Saturday

February's color for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge is red, but I already knew that I don't have much in the way of red scraps. In fact, for the Mini Tokyo Subway quiltalong, I actually had to buy a pack of red charms from eBay just to have enough. Anyway, I gathered up what I could find, and here's the entire stash, which includes fabrics that would more accurately be called orange or purple, or have generous dollops of other colors:

Red Scraps

Oh well, it'll just make it all sparkle, right? Not sure what I'm going to do with them yet. Probably some mini paper-pieced valentines or something like that.

Meanwhile, back in blue-land, I've made two more in my series of scrappy stars:

Broken Dishes

Four Boxes

Quilt Story: Fabric Tuesday #22 / Block Party

Update on Feb. 6: This is now my first entry for Quilt Story's Block Party!

Linking to Fabric Story's Fabric Tuesday for the first time, with this block that I made over the weekend:



The origami flower in the center is from Rebecca Wat's Fantastic Fabric Folding, but the overall block design is mine (although obviously traditional). Batiks are from Connecting Threads, and finished size is 6".