Making many diagonal striped squares, the quick & easy way, for the Houndstooth quilt

Take a look at my diagonal squares: 

Nice, neat, FLAT (since today’s task is to iron the little devils).  I got a good start on all the squares that had blue in them, since that was the smallest color (just around the edges).  THere are a LOT of white & yellow & greys left to do.  WHEEE! 

Once you’ve got a whole pile of these, you can use the to do MANY things.  Alternate the direction of the diagonal, and you end up with little squares everywhere on the diagonal.  Alternate a bunch of 2 square diagonals with a solid, and you’ve got a traditional houndstooth pattern.  Line up a bunch of squares and you’ll have a solid diagonal striped pattern, with undulating or gradiating colors, if you choose. 

MY intent is to use them in a herringbone, which is one of the more complex ways of arranging them, and it requires mimicking the threads of a herringbone weaving loom, weft and warp going across & down… the thing that makes a herringbone when weaving is the alternating peeks of each thread as it crosses and then goes under a thead of a different color going down through the pattern.  My intent is to alter the traditional pattern by a bit, to include some stripes of different colors, ultimately getting a herringbone/plaid quilt, representing my stepdaughter’s alma mater colors.  Hopefully it will work. 

I’ve counted up all the little stripes that will come from the top and all the stripes that will come from the sides, and how many blocks of each stripe color combination I will need to complete this task, and I’ve cut them.  Here’s how. 

I took WOF (width of fabric… usually 45”) strips of 2 inches.  Anyone wanting to make diagonal stripes with jelly rolls (a more traditional, 2 & ½ inch strip), could easily do it, the little squares will be bigger and easier to deal with in terms of numbers, but of course, I wanted a lot of variation in my herringbone plaid pattern, so I went with a smaller size.  I could have gone down to 1 & ½, but the resulting squares would be so tiny, that doing a whole twin sized quilt out of them would have been extremely tedious as a first use of the pattern. 

What you need at a very basic level are two strips of two different fabrics.  Make them fairly obviously different… a large pink floral on a small green background, paired with a stripe of a large pink flamingo on a green background, will just look like a mishmash… for this pattern, you lose the identity of the larger prints.  It’s the perfect pattern to use with a solid or batik or small print, particularly tone on tone.  This is one where you want the two colors used in each block to be a clear contrast. 

Sew the two stripes together.  Width of fabric.  Press to the darker side.  Do it again. Then take the two lovely, flat pieces of stripes and put them right sides together, alternating colors facing each other (If you have the same color on the side, flip one of them to start with the other end).  Sew up one side, then turn and sew up the other side.  You will have a long tube with the right sides in, nice & flat.  The second side is SO easy to sew up, because the fabric is being held steady by the side you already sewed, and as long as you flattened them out, you’re good.  Just hold them against the quarter inch seam guide and it goes together easily.

PUT THIS ON THE CUTTING BOARD AS IS.  You don’t need to turn it inside out, press, or anything.  You’ll need any ruler that has a 45 degree angle on it.  I use a small square ruler that shows 45 and 60 degree angles also. 

For the first cut, put the edge of your 45 degree line along one of the seams up the side of your tube.  Please note that in this photo, I put the 45 degree line along the bottom of the fabric edge so you can see the line easier, but for the cutting, I slid it up to where the line was on top of the seam (harder to see on the photo, but when the line of stitching is kind of covered by the line on the ruler and you CAN"T see them separately any more, you've got it properly aligned on that edge). 

Position it so the END of the cut will be at the end of the tube.  Your first point will be just at the seam of the other side.  Slice the whole way through the tube.  The little end is a scrap.  If you have not sliced off your selvage ends of fabric before slicing the strips, then position your ruler so that the selvage is part of the scrap end.  There is so little waste in this method of creating diagonally striped squares, that the extra inch of selvage is not worth trying to squeeze into your square (and it would only make one of the edges more bulky with an even stiffer fabric in that line, a big issue since the seams of these squares will all meet in these little corners and create excess bulk if you don’t keep them carefully trimmed & small. 

Your second cut will start where the first cut began, at the point.  But this point is NOT at the edge of the fabric.  It’s JUST inside the seam.  A cut that made the point go to the edge of the fabric would make a larter square, but it would also require undoing the stitches in that seam allowance at the other end.  This is supposed to be EASY, so cutting it larger and then having to rip out several stitches in each square makes no sense.  If you need the larger squares, just make the strips larger by a half inch and cut to THAT line of stitching.  When you position your ruler to make the point just inside the seam and the 45 degree line across the bottom of the other seam, you've got it right.  Just make sure that as you adjust the point, you don't come off the bottom line, and as you readjust the bottom line, you keep the point just inside the seam.  It takes a little sliding around at first, but it pretty quickly becomes an easy task.

In order to get it apart from the other squares, you’ll cut THROUGH the stitching at the other end, and just follow through. 

Don’t worry that you’re cutting into an important seam line for the next square over.  In fact, cutting back that little diagonal piece within the seam only helps prevent you from having excess flaps of fabric at all the joined corners of the squares when you’re finished.

Continue this way up the whole strip, positioning so the tip of each cut is at the seam of one edge, and the cut makes a new 45 degree angle with the seam on the other edge.   

Before you know it, you’ve got a whole stack of triangles to flatten into squares.  For each triangle, pick it up by the light-colored tip.

  Lay the other side on the ironing board.  Put the iron flat onto the other side.  Hold the iron there as you tug the tip in your fingers away from the other side.  For this photo, usually I'd have my iron where my middle finger is.  I needed a hand to hold the camera (not yet completely high-tech with the presentation).  The point is to open it by putting the iron onto the larger light stripe and tugging the light colored end with your other hand, while pushing the iron into it so that the seam flattens under the larger dark stripe. 

Push the iron onto the seam down the center of the square, and push out. 

This should flatten the seam under the dark strip of that side of the square.  Make sure the seam on the other side of that strip also goes towards the dark stripe, and flatten the whole square.  Store the squares flat & ready to use in your pattern.  If you choose, snip off the little flapping ears at the corner of the square (it's seen coming out under the iron in the photo above).  This little excess seam allowance is unnecessary and will again create bulk at exactly the point in your finished piece where bulk is not needed. 

Quilts for Pulse: auditioning the layouts of hearts for the quilt top

We have 4 options so far:  Straight rows of color

I find it boring, but in a straight quilt of 6 x 8 in a rainbow, there’s not a lot of room to bend the rainbow

Diagonal rows:

I kind of like the diagonal, but do we lose the rainbow at this point?

Chevron:

If the diagonal lost the color theme, then the chevron just takes it a step farther down the lost path.  I like the idea of a kind of arrow or "arch"... but when put on the table, it doesn't make the cut.

 

Radiating:  Red in center and outside corners, other colors radiating in & out from them…

Just a hot mess, and NOT just because some of my block got twisted as I walked around the table & put them all together!

SO I’m sick of putting all 48 of these blocks on the table, walking around & re-arranging… but someone had a cool idea… how about if I turn the blocks upside down for every other row, or for each half of the quilt?  HMMM… I might have to put some rows together right side up & upside down, and then see how to combine them.  I like the idea.  It JUST might work… at least better than the straight rows. 

Thinking... thinking... thinking... needs more thought.  I'll give y'all the verdict later... but for now... notice, this kind of playing around with the layout requires a few things... first, the camera so that you can remember & put them next to each other, it takes WAY too long to arrange & re-arrange so you can see them back & forth.  Second, a big area to use to play with them... ALSO, you've got them all pressed so you're not dealing with lumpy seams on top of all the unfinished edges and the fact that the stupid blocks will twist & turn on the table since they're not completely together yet. 

AND an imagination.... preferably one that can think in patterns, so that you can envision the chevron and set the blocks in place to make it work.  ANYONE can think in a stripe, but if you can figure out how to move the stripe over by one block, for every new row... you've got a good start. 

Quilts for Pulse: Auditioning the selvage heart and cutting triangles off the heart halves

For my Orlando Pulse quilt, the intention is to have a heart for each of the 49 victims of the tragedy.  The front of the quilt will be 6 columns of 8 blocks each, which adds up to 48 (and magically, it takes 6 colors to make a rainbow, another major element needed in this quilt, so there are 8 blocks of each of the 6 colors).  But I need another block.  And  don’t want to favor any one color over any other.  I’ve been interested in selvage quilting for a while, and this seems a good opportunity to do it. 

 Photo of plain colored heart next to selvage heart:

I considered the possibility of positioning the selvages in a way so that it would appear they were curving around the edges of the heart, but to start with, the hearts called for by the initial Orlando Modern Quilt Guild request were squared off, no curving pieces required.  But on top of that, because there are 6 colors of selvages (and 6 colors in the rainbow), to try to turn it into a curved piece where one color was at the center and the others radiated out from it, would necessarily mean much less of the color in the center and more of the color around the perimeter.  I decided to do it as if I were simply replacing one of my rainbow single-color fabrics, and using the selvages to create a pieced stripe fabric.

I cut two 5 & ½ inch x 10 & ½ inch strips of one of my white-on-white fabrics to use as a base, and lined my 6 selvages up in order of rainbow color.  Because they are selvages, there is a large portion of each selvage strip that’s taken up with brand name, color dots, and other information that identifies the type of fabric, the designer, the store it came from, and the colors used.  One would think this would be good information to use to match and find the same fabric in the future if I ever need it again, but my favorite fabric store owner, whose “colors in quilting” class I took last week, assures me that these days the designs of the fabrics are changing so rapidly that it would be near impossible to find additional sources of a fabric just by keeping the selvages.  Still... I’m sure the manufacturers have a reason for putting all this information on the selvages, probably something involving identifying it in their own inventory, and customers who use fabric have spent centuries slicing off the selvages before sewing (because either the thicker weave of the selvage or the interruption of the pattern and color would ruin our projects). 

Quilters have a tradition of trying to be frugal about fabrics, so it makes sense that modern quilters would look at the selvages as we tossed them in the wastebasket and wonder if they couldn’t find a way to make use of them in a modern pattern… Selvage projects are becoming en vogue, so of course I had to try it. 

But the odd coloring of the edge of the selvage means that my rainbow will be oddly mottled… Still, rather than abandon the idea, I carry on.  I take 22 inch strips of selvage from each color, and sew them onto my base fabric, one at a time, approximately a quarter inch from the cut edge.  The un-cut edge will not fray, so I need now sew it just yet.  I intend for it to show and I don’t need a line of stitching showing down every strip of the stripe… so for now, I’m just sewing each piece down by it’s cut edge, lapping the selvage edge over far enough that IF I choose to tack it down later, it will cover the stitching from the previously placed selvage.  I finish attaching each of the 6 selvages (in rainbow order… ROYGBV) to the base fabric, and slice the two bases apart, cutting through the 22 inches of selvage at the halfway point.  This makes strips that are a half inch bigger than necessary, but that’s not really a problem.  THIS heart does not need to fit in a row or column of similarly sized hearts.  It is EASIER to complete the task if I cut if back by another half inch to make my selvage pieced “fabric” just the same 10 & ½ inches that all the other heart halves are… but it’s not a problem if I choose not to do it that way. 

Before I go further, I have to decide, which part of the heart will be the middle?  I audition the blocks by putting them together each possible way, just laying the white background down on top in a way that approximates the final heart, and I take a photo with my cellphone.  Then I switch the blocks around and re-position the background pieces, and take another photo.  Looking at a photo often clarifies an issue.  You no longer see the waves and threads and strips wehre it’s not quite sewn perfectly, you see it closer to the way it will look when it’s finished.  Before access to easy photos, quilters would put their fabric on a wall and step back, or maybe squint at the different options, to see which they liked better.  With cameras in all of our cellphones these days, it’s easier… we can snap photos and put the photos next to each other to make the choice. 

PHOTOS of selvage heart auditions:

Look at my options.  In one photo, I’ve put the Violet part of the rainbow in the center, in the other, I’ve put the red part in the center.  My informal survey of the people sewing around me at my Friday afternoon quilting gathering, was a tie vote.  And I could not decide which I liked better.  But I ended up choosing to put the red in the center, as this is the color of the blood spilled from the hearts of the 49 people who died in Orlando at Pulse. 

Slicing off the triangles:

My intention has always been to piece the back of this quilt.  We’ll see what I come up with.

My choices are starting to expand as I move forward in creating these hearts.  You see as I finished putting together each heart half, I piled them up, choosing to do all the cutting & sewing at once, and then trim the excess threads (so they don’t show through the white side of the fabric on top of the batting once it’s quilted), trimming off the excess part of the squares (since the heart form only needs the triangle to remain and leaving all that excess fabric inside the quilt is unnecessary and would make it lumpy), and press the hearts so that I can take the next step of sewing the halves together, all at the same time.  Pressing is a job I don’t enjoy, but the results are so wonderful that I don’t skimp on it. 

Photo of ruler ready to slice off some triangles:

Still, I don’t enjoy it, so I delay it as long as possible.  I spent a few HOURS trimming off triangles.  This seems a good moment to show how easy it is to line a good ruler up with the stitches and trim off the excess on a project like this.  My ruler has little quarter inch lines at each edge, and you just put that line on the seam, with the open edge hanging in the direction of the stuff you’re cutting off, then run the rotary cutter up the edge.  Easy peasy… If you’ve done a better job than I have, and managed to attach the little squares with perfect diagonal seams, you can even accomplish the slicing of all 3 little triangles off of every heart half, without spending much time on the repositioning of the ruler.  But if you’re like me, and your seams aren’t all perfectly straight, just match up the top & bottom of each seam, and make sure the middle doesn’t bow out for you to slice through (you need the stitching to actually still be there once you’re finished taking off the triangles) and then slice. 

We end up with a BUNCH of little triangles.  Some that are about 5 -5 & ¼ inches on the legs (right angle isosceles triangles, if you remember your high school geometry, we’ve basically cut a 5 & ½ square diagonally down the middle, leaving ¼ inch for the seam).  Others are about 1 & 1/4 inches to the legs, also isosceles, also right angles. 

It occurs to me that I might have little triangles of colors to pop into the backing of this quilt.  It could be a wonderfully symbolic idea… the pieces from the hearts on the front of the quilt, shattering and creating entirely new designs on the back.  Hopefully beautiful designs.  We’ll see.  It’s an idea.  The smaller triangles even seem a little too small to use, but sometimes a very small pop of color inserted into an otherwise white or beige background can be more powerful than large splashes of color, more pleasing to the eye… and I can’t resist the opportunity to use the little pieces of the hearts from the front of the quilt. 

mid century modern quilt

OK… so for a while I’ve been obsessed with the mid-century modern designs like my parents had when I was growing up.  I know now that we had some furnishings that would be considered Scandinavian (with a last name like “Lindquist”, how could we not?).  OH how I wish I could have back some of the stuff they got rid of when they retired & moved to Florida in the 1990s! 

ANYWAYS, I am more drawn to the sleek, contemporary, “atomic” designs than to the kitschy plastic… I have this ambition to create a starburst wallhanging out of wood shims (great opportunity to personalize on issues of color, as opposed to getting the same thing from a store).  And I’ve been doodling various mid-century artist motifs for a while, trying to come up with some fun quilt patterns… one I finally followed through on was a “chain” type form. 

Anyone who grew up in that era will remember the bead chain “curtains” that sometimes were put across doorways… you could block the vision from room to room while having a super-cool, hip, hippy-dippy decoration.  They even clicked when you pulled them aside to enter the room.  Lots of motifs similar to a bead chain were drafted, some more organic than others, some looking like a chain of amoebas and others looking like some type of interlocking machinery. 

I drew an inspiration drawing, and from that, decided I needed to find a way to do it without curves (at least the first time around).  I was trying to find a way to create this quilt with a bunch of strips and not have to cut exacting small pieces… Strip em together & then slice, strip & slice… seems like less little pieces of things flying around my sewing room all the time.  Always a good plan. 

So I doodle up an idea, then put together a more detailed way to look at it, blocking off several different sections until I can eyeball a single block that can be repeated.  I get to the point where I realize that to make the “chain” portion of it, I need to add “sashing” to the side of each block, then alternate the way I put the blocks together so that the sash turns into a chain separating two blocks from an alternate color. 

For my “chain”, I choose two colors, a light grey and a dark grey.  And for the “beads”?  It took a while, but I finally discovered that a layer cake would be the perfect variety of fabric to fish from.  This was before my selvage obsession, so I was not opposed to purchasing a pre-cut group of fabric just yet.  For the uninitiated, a “layer cake” is a group of fabrics pre-cut into 10 x 10 inch squares.  Usually from the same manufacturer and the same designer’s line of fabric for that season, a layer cake can often help you find a variety of fabrics that have already been curated to match each other in terms of tone, value, hue… You can almost always be sure that if you choose anything from that one layer cake, that you will be able to match it with anything else from the same layer. 

I chose a number of my favorites from this particular layer.  They were single color fabrics, at the most extreme, “tone on tone”, so that the beads of this design would pop from the grey chains by virtue of their color rather than their print… I sliced each of my favorites in half, divided them into two piles.  Each half of a 10 by 10 inch slice went into a different pile.  I wanted an even number of light greys and dark greys… I wanted each color to be evenly dispersed between light greys and dark… if it looked funny, I could always switch off, get a whole new set of colors (maybe pinks rather than blues), and do them up separately to see if it worked better to have the colors be wildly different in each chain.  If I ended up with extra blocks, who cares?  I can make them into pillows or placemats or table runners or a whole different quilt with a whole different look for having a different color combination. 

Then I sliced up a bunch of the greys in width of fabric (WOF) strips of 2 & ½ inches. 

I took all the 5 x 10 inch colored pieces from ONE pile, and sewed it to the side of one of the dark greys.  From the OTHER pile, every one of the colored pieces got sewed to the side of the light greys.  Yes, it would take several strips to get every one of them done, but after they were done, I sliced them apart, then I went down the other side of each strip with the same color.  Then I took the length of the layers and took another strip and went down them, then on the other side.  By the time I was finished, I had a number of blocks of 5 x 10 inch colors, surrounded by a 2 & ½ inch dark grey, and another number of blocks surrounded by the LIGHT grey.  Next step… on every one of the dark greys, sew a strip of light grey to one side.  On every light grey, sew a strip of dark grey to one side. 

CLEARLY, I need to do another of these tops, this time taking more photos of the intermediate process.  It's so much fun to work without slicing up teeny tiny little squares, rectangles and triangles of fabric before starting to do the work, ... it's great to zoom along and get stuff done and then slice it up bit by bit as you create, but I'm having a hard time stopping to show it.  So I'll make an effort... I"ll do another one of these.  But I like the general way it worked.  take a peek & see for yourself!

Now you didn't see that coming, did you?  SUPER cool mid-century-looking chain, from me talking about sewing strips of light & dark grey onto 5 x 10 inch blocks of color?  To finish this one up, I'm going to put more of the dark grey on one side to kind of offset it, and then I'll be using this as a sample top for a longarm class I'm taking later this month.  I want to have several tops finished so that I can rent the longarm machine for many hours & practice, practice, practice... so for now, this is where it stands.  Sitting in my project box, ready to be finished after I take a class in how to use the longarm machine.  HOW MUCH FUN is this? 

quilts for pulse: heart rainbow quilt in progress

OK, so I went to town.  I sliced the selvages off all my fabrics for the heart quilt.  Hopefully these will combine for a cool/modern heart that I can use as the 49th heart on the back. 

I sliced a bunch of "low volume" whites (3 different light beige-y ones) into 2 inch strips & 5 & 1/2 inch strips.  I took the strips and sliced the into squares (2 inches & 5 & 1/2 inch squares. 

I sliced each of my 6 rainbow colors into 5 & 1/2 inch strips... and then sliced each strip into 10 & 1/2 inches again, so from each 45 inch width of fabric, I got 4 strips at 5 & 1/2 inches by 10 & 1/2 inches (that's 4 times 10 & 1/2 to equal 42 inches)... it was VERY lucky that the fabrics were about exactly 45 inches wide and the selvages were not wider than 1 & 1/2 inches, because two selvages at 1 & 1/2 inches each brought me RIGHT UP to the edge of being able to slice 4 colored heart pieces out of each strip.  (It was not expensive fabric, so some of hte selvages were a little wider than I'm used to seeing, with the information printed quite far onto the edge of the fabric). 

 These are the selvages, in a baggie to keep them from getting scattered while I work on the rest of the project

Here are the background blocks, waiting to be sewn onto the heart halves


Here are the heart halves, piled up in rainbow order (ROYGBV) and awaiting their turn at the sewing machine:


Here is a heart block after the white pieces are sewn to the heart block halves (can you see the heart yet?  Look at the diagonal seams across each of the white parts):


And HERE is a heart block, white background parts finger-pressed into place.  NOW you can see the heart, right?:


OK. so I've got 47 more to finish.  After I get them piled up with all the white parts sewn on, I'll slice off the excess fabric (in this last photo, under the white parts), and clip the stray threads, and press them properly.  To press each of these, I'll have to fold under hte red part and press both sides towards the heart.  To press the heart seam towards the low-volume white side would be to risk it showing up through the white fabric in the finished quilt. 

UNLIKE in seamstress sewing, when you do most quilting, you press both sides of a seam towards the darker fabric (in general, there are some exceptions).  You do NOT separate the fabrics and press them open.  In sewing clothing, we want the smallest possible layer of fabric between the body and the top layer.  We also want the seam to ease over curves of the body, gracefully.  Open seams are the way to do it.  In quilting, we want the seam to take wear & tear of GENERATIONS worth of being lovingly used every night as a blanket.  And we do not want the slightest possibility of exposing the threads between the fabric.  So we press the seam allowance to the side rather than opening it.  It's harder to pull apart with rough use, if it's pressed to the side and the FABRIC is holding itself together, than if it's pressed open and the only thing holding it together is the little bitty piece of thread.  AND because we use many colors in most quilts, we want to make the least possible opportunities for the colors to show through each other, which is why we press them towards the darker fabric. 

Next post will have most of the blocks finished and I'll have pictures of how to clean up the block, trim the excess fabric, and press it. 

Quilts for Pulse (Orlando terrorist attack)

It's been a while since I last posted, but I suppose it's time.  We've moved.  We're now in a house in Orlando that's half the size of the one we were in when we last posted.  We've stopped the fostering adventure, having had our hearts broken one too many times and getting to an age where we knew if we made a commitment to adopt, then our retirement options would be delayed and severely limited... we will fulfill our commitment to the next generation in some other way (and I have a few ideas that are more appropriate for a later post).

With the move, there's no chance that I can return to work, at least not as a lawyer.  The process of un-retiring myself from other jurisdictions and transferring/taking a new bar exam, and THEN FINDING work as a lawyer, it would take so long and be so expensive and emotion-consuming, that it would not work.  We've become content to live on less, which is kind of cool.  There's a lot fewer rooms to clean, a lot less junk to manage... we're still busily getting rid of the junk. 

And I've been quilting up a storm.  Sewed a few skirts first, as my last foster daughter needed a new black skirt for a concert she was in a year & a half ago, and as she was insisting on skirts that were too small & short for a violin player on a stage to wear (first concert, lots of the youngsters don't realize how DIFFICULT it is to maintain some bit of modesty while sitting in a cute skirt in a chair on a stage)... so I sewed up a really lovely flowy, flippy knit skirt that would swirl around her legs if she took a little spin... lightweight and fun... and she loved it.  Black to match nearly anything.  She wore it so often that she ripped holes in the seams... choosing to wear it during playtime and running and tumbling around... at that difficult age between childhood and teenhood and not quite realizing that the clothing she chooses to wear at playtime MIGHT get muddy or torn if it's not made for the task.  But on top of that, I think she loved the idea of feeling like a Disney Princess with skirts swirling around her ankles as she defended the world and peace & justice... It was quite cute. 

So I made a few for myself, and then she left (broke our hearts), and I looked around my sewing room.  LOTS of half-finished projects (mostly my own... UnFinishedObjects, or UFOs, are typical for crafters to accumulate over a lifetime. 

SOOOO... since I last posted, there have been a few finished projects.  We'll talk more about them in other posts. 

I've been attending quilt camps (at Quilt Trends, http://quilttrends.com/index.asp , a WONDERFUL space close to our new home), and taking quilting classes (realized that the basic skills are probably worth knowing), and showing up at a Friday day-long sew-in... for a while.

Puttering along, worried about an old friend in Orlando who is now a judge and had an emergency appendectomy a few weeks ago... thinking about some other friends whose children are GROWN UP already and graduating college since I left the city... thinking how our lives would have changed, how we'd have stopped going out to the nightclubs & such as we aged, if I'd have stayed... I get up one Sunday morning for a leisurely walk to church (yep, our new place is WALKING distance from church... woo-hoo!), when my friend, who is being released from the hospital after some post-operative difficulties, posts that some horrible thing just took place in Orlando... This friend is very reliable, but ... well... my friends are law enforcement officers, judges, politicians, criminal prosecutors & defense attorneys.  A wide variety of people with a very wide range of what "horrible" might look like.  If it weren't Bob, making that claim of horror, I might have wondered what new politically charged issue had just come to light. 

But this was Bob... reliable, interesting, super-cool dude Bob.  (Is it POSSIBLE to be both a judge AND a cool dude?  Well, you just gotta know Bob). 

Within a few hours, we hears the news, and that there had been a terrorist attack in Orlando... my heart sank.  As the names and vital statistics of the victims came to light, I realize that most of these kids were truly just in grade school when I left Orlando... and though it was known as a gay nightclub, I recall being a young adult in Orlando and how the gay nightclubs are there... it's not about being gay, it's about having a fun night.  Having a SAFE PLACE to have a fun night.  And I realize the time of day this happened... 2 am.  Last call.  If I recall my young adulthood correctly, that's the time of night when everyone left has had just a few too many drinks, they're NOT at their best (except maybe the night club staff, who are starting the cleanup task)... There are probably a few people trying to fight off nausea from a few too many tequila sunrises... a few looking to hookup and realizing that most everyone they were flirting with earlier have gone already...

The irony for me is that I'm also the ex-wife of a Muslim man, who immigrated from Egypt.  I'm also familiar with that community and it's difficulty with the concept of being gracious about people with lifestyles other than their own.   I had watched as my husband at the time became more extreme about his choices in lifestyle... banning vanilla extract from our kitchen, for example, and refusing to go to a beach (he had proposed on a beach), because people in the mosque convinced him, an adult, that these things were evil.  He was disappointed that he had not been able to convert me, and I realized that the person he claimed to be when we first married, simply did not exist.  This person who claimed he respected my faith, was really trying desperately to convert me, hiding his true intend if necessary, as a 'ends justify the means' choice, because he really wanted me to be able to go to heaven with him and he really did NOT respect that my faith could get me there.  Oh well...

So I feel huge sympathy with anyone who has become victim of this faith that seems to encourage extremes... And I remember going to night clubs with my friends, from time to time, if there was a special event like "Latin night", even a gay club, despite that I'm not a member of the LGBT community and would not be interested in any hookups on any night that my friends & I went there.  AND I have friends who would be the first called out to the scene of any crime, trying to solve disaster... I've been to the morgue and to the medical examiner's office, and I know how this stuff works. 

And when he was first retired, my Dad spent a decade going to Orlando Regional Medical Center... I don't remember whether it was Thursday mornings or Fridays... for Grand Rounds.  He liked being the old recently retired doctor and feeling like the young ones were looking up to him and asking his opinion... and he liked even more that they had free bagels and hard boiled eggs (he told me the docs would peel them and eat just the whites, saying that the yolks were what caused heart disease)... he liked even more that he could keep up with the current trends in medicine, and particular mortality issues (as he had been a Pathologist and Coroner in his career).  THIS is the hospital where the injured were taken that Sunday morning... THIS is the town who were no longer going to feel safe in their own night clubs... THESE were my friends, being awakened in the middle of the night and taking any break in the action to call their own young adult kids at 4 am, to make sure they were home, safe and in bed. 

So when the Orlando Modern Quilt Guild said they'd accept and distribute quilts from other modern quilters for the victims, of COURSE I had to.  I suggested to our Columbus MQG's president that we do a heart quilt, rainbow colors... she said we'd wait till the Orlando quilt guild said exactly what they wanted... and guess what... DUH... heart quilts, rainbow colors.  On "low volume" background.

I know I've been quiet for a while, so I may repeat myself... in quilting terms, "low volume" means very soft, light colors... basically shades of white or beige, usually. 

So I ran out & picked up a rainbow worth of colors for the hearts... ROYGBV... if you recall, you pronounce it, "roy-gee-biv"... it's the acronym for the colors of the rainbow... Red, Orange, Yellow, Green Blue, Violet.  Basically, if you start on the red segment of the color wheel and just go around till you come back up to the color next to it, you'll have yourself a rainbow. 

They're wanting at least 5 x 6, or 30 blocks... but will take up to twin sized quilt tops.  If blocks only, then 10 inch finished (meaning 10 & 1/2 inches on a side if not already sewn into a top)... They have put out a tutorial for making a simple heart.  My quilt guild started the project when the simple tutorial heart was the one posted, but the Orlando quilt guild revised their suggestions several times so that some creativity appears to be acceptable. 

And I've decided not to just contribute blocks, but to do a whole quilt.  Let's see how well I manage that.  My idea SO FAR is to go with 6 X 8... which makes 48 blocks at 10 inches each, JUST ABOUT the size of a proper twin.  But that makes 48 hearts and it's just too tempting to the artist in me.  49 angels were created that night... 49 who went to the dance and never went home, who will be dancing in heaven waiting for their loved ones... 49 families who lost someone.  I can't make a quilt with just 48 hearts.  So I'm going to TRY... Here's my thoughts about making the 49th heart. 

I've been toying with the idea of doing an improvisational "bolt" of background cloth... trying out the "Modern Improvisational" book (I'll post a link to it later) suggestion for a "floating squares" quilt.  I've also been collecting selvages... got to a point of no longer even bothering with pre-cut fabrics, just buying from the bolt, in at least a yard, so that I have enough selvage to make it worth cutting.  I had thought of doing a second "bolt" of selvages, but was just toying with it. 

I think what I'll do here... I've started creating the hearts already... cut off all my selvages from my 6 rainbow colored fabrics and from the 3 low-volume (beige) backgrounds... MAYBE I can somehow create a heart out of the selvages.  I have to figure out how to shape the hart so that as it gets larger towards the outside, that it doesn't lose it's shape as a heart.  I know from experience (my "secret heart of my niece" quilt), that when one starts with a small heart and tries to follow it outward in concentric lines, that the curves get distorted... the problem seems to be that as you try to follow the interior V of the top of the heart, this starts to be less & less prominent as the heart gets bigger, because the depth of the V does not get proportionately bigger. 

I'm going to have to draw it out.  Or perhaps instead of starting with a small heart and moving out until I run out of selvages, I'll cut out a heart and use a technique like "foundation piecing", which is that I sew my selvages onto a foundation block in the designated pattern, rather than sewing them to each other and hoping it works.  My foundation would have the pattern drawn on and I'd keep my pieces within that pattern.  OR maybe it would work as well if I created two half-hearts, and then sewed them together.  We'll have to see. 

And then around it, I'd go with the low-volume floating squares improvisational background.  If I piece these around the selvage heart, it should be possible to grow the backing to the right size without too much muss & fuss... and so my back piece would be a single heart... the 49th heart, kind of near the top of the twin blanket, at the center. 

I worried that having the 49th heart on the back would somehow diminish the meaning of the fact that I was including 49 hearts... one being strange and isolated to the back... but then I remember the whole POINT of being supportive to issues involving the LGBT community, which is that even things which are different from the rest can be just as beautiful. 

So that's the plan.  I'll post a photo or two later... but I wanted to get this up now. 

Practice makes perfect... options to find quilts to practice on, and my great binding adventure

For former seamstresses, such as myself, who are struggling with the teeny-tiny 1/4 inch seam allowance on quilts, doing the job of binding feels relatively familiar.  Fold, press, pleat... when they talk about a "miter", it's very similar to a Dart.  And the finishing stitch feels very much like that final hem that we put on a dress or a new pair of pants.  Tiny little hand stitches, hoping not to have them show too much against the front of the dress... and the wonderful thing about the binding is that in a QUILT, unlike in most dresses, you've got several layers of fabric to work with.  You can easily stitch through the first few parts of the quilt and not get anywhere near having your work show up on the "good" side. 

On the other hand, most quilts (at least the non-framed variety) are meant to have both sides showing.  Both used... neither should have little stray threads poking from a frayed edge of a seam!

The good news on the 1/4 inch seams is that if you've purchased fabric meant for quilting, at least, the feel of it is a little stiffer (it's not meant to softly conform to a body part, there is never any stretch at all in it, and even on the bias, it's a little less stretchy and soft than we're used to)... the fraying is also not as prolific.  Which means, of cousre, that we have to be more exacting in our seams and cuts.  We can't add a little ease into it (like we do when we put some ease in a bustline, for example) by simply letting our machines stray a little further into the seam line... and the quilter never seeks to nip in a waistline a tiny bit by making the curve of the path of the needle be just a little wider. 

No, the straying that we are used to doing with our machines... the graceful curves along a seamline, the diminishing part of a point of a dart, the things we do to give a little more contour to our clothing, does not work well on a flat surface. 

So we need to learn how to sew a straight line.

Luckily, it seems that most quilting groups are involved in joint quilting adventures.  It sees the safest of these joint ventures to get involved with is about quilts for charity. 

There are many projects... for children in hospitals (the Linus Project) ... or for wounded war heroes (Quilts of Valor), and many, may other similar projects.  Most quilting organizations will pick one or several charity projects, and will share in the making of quilts to donate.  The wonderful thing about the sharing of these projects is that there are many opportunities to learn the basic skills of quilting while doing this good work and there is almost no way your beginning quilting skills can really mess up the project enough to worry about it.  There is always someone who can help you figure out what you did wrong and no one will ever get fussy that your points did not match! 

Don't get me wrong, they'll TELL you that your points don't match (often with an offer of help to figure out how to do it better next time), but as everyone will tell you, the beauty of a quilt is often in it's errors, so this is a good way to learn that point.  The recipients of your quilts will never know that you made the work harder for yourself by using the wrong type of needle, or that you should have mitered the corners rather than that awkward little tuck that you used... And you're not getting stuck on your own pet project!  They will LOVE the place in their quilt where the point doesn't exactly match.  As they are waiting for the pain medications to take effect from the latest and hardest physical therapy yet, they will be staring at your imperfectly matched star and they'll think, "I can't believe they made all these quilts for all us guys.  Some nice lady, a perfect stranger, did this for me.  I wonder what she was thinking when she realized that the star was a little lopsided..." 

They will love it all the more for it's imperfections.  Believe me.  I inherited some quilt tops that a great, great aunt thought were not worthy of being finished, and I cherish them all the more for the imperfections.  It is not the same with clothing.  My mother made me many items of clothing in her lifetime, and I loved every item... but for some, the imperfections in the clothing make it impossible to wear.  Imperfections in a quilt RARELY make them unsuitable for providing warmth and comfort!

Still... as nice as it is to be able to be imperfect, it's also nice to try to improve our skills... and this is what those charity quilts are great for.

A few weeks ago, I took on the binding of a Project linus quilt.  A wonderful little quilt made of simple squares in primary colors.  The binding had already been cut, the sandwich quilted and squared up, and all that needed to happen was for me to sew together the binding and get it ON to the quilt.  I had only done one binding before, having accomplished the finishing in different ways before... So I pulled up a tutorial online and followed it exactly.  Unfortunately, my sewing machine did not cooperate.  I had to get it serviced.

At the sewing machine service shop, the lady taking in my machine asked, "did you know you were using embroidery thread?"  Well, yes, I suppose I did, it was still there from a previous project and the color matched so I just used it.  Hmm... could this be part of my problem?  

So I said, "I may need to organize my thread a little better if I'm going to keep working on the variety of projects that I want to work on". 

Was that an understatement or WHAT?  I was sick of a growing collection of thread spools and bobbins that had no home, so they kept getting separated and moved around.  With no dedicated sewing space for the past 8 years, I had managed to separate and move the pieces of my crafting/sewing supply cabinet over & over until it was unmanageable.  I'm sure I have 3 or 4 spools each of every color in the rainbow, if only I could FIND them. 

So when I went to pick up the machine after it was serviced, I wondered aloud to the saleslady, "I have always wanted one of those things that hangs on the wall and displays all the thread, so that I would have it all in the same place and easy to see".  I'm glad I said that, because she said she doesn't like those things, they allow the thread to collect dust!  BRILLIANT!  If I've got so many different spools of thread that I've had some sitting in the closet for nearly 8 years, of course it would get dusty if I let it sit out. 

So I went to JoAnne's... and $20 later, I had enough little plastic bins for all the CONES of thread I have as well as all the LITTLE spools... a little thinking and I realized that I can put a bobbin that's still full of thread on a spike close to the actual thread spool it came from, and there you go... suddenly, I've got a level of organization that I've not been able to achieve in 8 years!  yippee!!! 

Because the bins are plastic, I can see through to see the colors of thread, unlike my mother's old sewing basket... and because they have lids, I can avoid the dust issue. 

Binding this little Linus Project quilt taught me a lot.

Oh yeah, and it also taught me how to miter the corner... a very cute little trick that makes the whole finishing process on the quilt a whole lot easier than I had originally thought.

From now on, no more stalling on the final touch... it seems binding is NOT a part of the quilting process that will hang me up any more!  Binding, I have discovered... is EASY! 

OK... next step... join in one of the "block of the month" or "heart block" adventures... where I sew JUST ONE BLOCK, according to the instructions of someone else, and either give it to them (a heart block for a sick quilting bee member, or a "thank you" block for an officer of the quilting club who is leaving her office), or enter into the lottery where I might get ALL the blocks to use as I choose...

I hear these block things can sometimes get picky.  THey want seams pressed properly, and the right size, and points all in the right place... and exactly the right size... and colors need to be followed... well, basically, ALL directions need to be followed closely to do it right.  And I understand that I can learn a LOT in these things, because if I do not do it right, someone will tell me... (hopefully in a nice way)... and if I WIN the lottery for the month's blocks, then I will have the chance to see how other people accomplished the task and see how exacting their standards are, see whether my own work measures up, as well as start to understand why one would want to follow all those pesky instructions... that the blocks where the seams are NOT pressed into the darker color start to show through, or the blocks that are cut too small or where the seams are too big, may not fit into the whole quilt... etc., etc...

Practice makes perfect, and quilting clubs, bees, guilds, projects... can provide plenty of opportunities for practice.