Give and Receive

Swap-bot, of course, is about swapping and I do quite a few quilt blocks and quilties. The two on this post are not the same swaps. The brilliant late July flower quiltie arrived today and was a shot of summer in Janaury. Maybe you can see there are beads in the middle of some of the flowers. I immediately put it on my design wall where I can have a bit of brilliant sunshine every time I glance up.

This black and white block was for a BOM swap. Making it yesterday reminded once more how much I love paper piecing. This block has 64 pieces. I did not have to cut any of them to size or with a template. I work with strips of fabric. And it all went together with most of the points meeting exactly. I could never do that by fussy cutting and sewing. I feel so much a better sewer than I really am.

Maariner's Starts Finished

When quilting, everything takes longer than you think it's going to take. But this quilt is finally finished - except the label. I'm not sure what I'll name it. Those who look at this blog over a long period of time have seen all these stars before -- months ago. At last I'm glad to have it finished. I'm even wondering if there is a wall in my house wide open enough to hang it for a while. Perhaps ...

I truly loved using Carol Doak's paper pieced Mariner's Star patterns. And I loved choosing the colors, the specific fabrics for each star. I had a number of false starts. Even when I thought I was done I decided one star block just wasn't doing it for me and made another. It's the great variety of colors and fabrics that pleases me most. It was an exercise in color and mostly I'm pleased. So, hurray! On to the next.

[PS - changed the photo because I was able to have someone hold it up outdoors so I wouldn't have to stand on a stood and shoot it on the floor which inevitably distorts the dimensions.

Twenty stars

This is all twenty paper pieced stars. Done! Except for fixing a couple of mistakes that are easily fixable. They will have stripping between them so they won't be so on top of each other as they are here pinned to my design wall. This part was exciting and challenging. Putting them together and quilting is boring but I'll do it slowly, bit by bit. These will not reappear in this blog for quite a few months.
I have another quilt in my head that excites me as much as the stars do so I may sew that entire top before I start quilting this. We'll see how disciplined I feel like being.

The book here provided all the star patterns. As you can see at a glance I did not follow Carol Doak's color schemes -- except there is one -- on the lower right of the book that has a near equivalent in the quilt. I feel I have learned by trial and error, changing my mind after making color choices, somethings throwing out the first couple of sections when I saw how they looked. But I feel rewarded and even excited. Sometimes I just turn on the light in the sewing room [studio?], stand in the door way so I have perspective and study these stars from a distance. Then I go up closer and look at the various fabrics I've used - some fabrics repeatedly, others only once or twice.

This was a real stash celebration. I used only stash fabrics. When I bought the background fabric, which is a deep purple with a deep olive green floral design, I knew I would use it for the background for something colorful. That was all I knew at the time. I wish there were enough to do all the stripping between stars but there isn't. I'll find something else.

More stars

I'm on a roll with these paper pieced mariner's stars designed by Carol Doak. This is twelve, I'm planning definitely sixteen and, if I have enough of the background fabric, I will go for 20. There are 24 designs in Carol's book, Mariner's Stars. The blocks are 8x8. I think I want stripping of the background fabric between -- there's the problem. This was an end-of-roll fabric a number of months ago when it was on sale. I don't think I can get more and I won't go to the trouble of a complex search. So what I can do with the blocks is limited.

But isn't that in keeping with what quilting was traditionally about? Earlier quilters used what they had and if they ran out they had to make do or find a substitute. I am more of that mindset than the modern one that says we should have exactly what we want at all times. That has never been the way of my life -- in any respect -- and I don't expect it ever will be. I don't feel cheated or irritated that that's the case. I suppose that attitude is somewhat unAmerican today. But my parents were depression era people who passed on the "make do" attitude to me. I can see no reason to change that attitude.

The final four stars

These are the last four of the twelve Carol Doak paper pieced stars that will make a lap quilt I have a bunch of things in progress and these must have the paper removed -- not really a big deal, just a bit time consuming.

Then I will quilt them one by one in a "quilt as you go" method because I want to do mostly outline quilting. And finally I will put them together.

Happily I found another black that is very, very much like this background fabric of which I have only about a third of a yard left. The new fabric is the same black but instead of the polka dots, it has tiny hearts which are in the same colors. I think the blend will be close enough that one will need to look carefully to realize I've used to different fabrics.

And I purchased enough of the new fabric for the back so there is no question now of what to use for the back. I have a couple of completed stars that did not satisfy me enough to use on the front. They may find a less conspicuous home on the back. Very little happens quickly in the world of quilting -- well some things do. I have just finished a couple of crib size quilts for a charity project and they went quite rapidly. I don't have a photo yet, but soon.

Snow Day

"Snow day" -- didn't you love those words when you were a kid? As if the sky itself gave you a whole day free. I still feel that way. What will be called something like "the big blizzard of December '09" came in about midnight last night. I had just put down a book and was thinking about it when I heard a whistling wind and looked out. I slept maybe a hour and awoke to a shiny whiteness -- the security lights outside were magnified by the snow so I got up and watched it a while then, being wide awake, went back to my book for quite a while, looked out occasionally as the bush outside my window accumulated big blossoms of snow. It's still coming down, my windows are iced over outside.

The snow day euphoria has hit me. I'm playing. That's what it feels like. I need to make two small quilts for swaps, sender's choice. So I've gone to the Mariner's Compass Stars book by Carol Doak which I've been wanting to use since I bought it about a year ago. Of the 24 patterns I finally chose two and copied them. Then came the fun of pulling out my stash of fabrics with metallics -- when I bought the book I said to myself "this will be for the metallics." Choosing fabrics for each was an excuse to feel like King Midas in an illustration from a child's book -- he sat at a table making piles of the gold coins that were all around him probably chuckling "heh-heh-heh." I went through each piece -- and there are a lot, some are just remnants of previous projects, but many are FQs or half yards or more.

I've made one star already [full disclosure, I started this yesterday when I knew there was going to be a snow day]. I love Carol's patterns, I love deciding on different color combinations than she uses, I love watching the points come out cleanly, I love the visual illusion of layered triangles. I love paper piecing! I also love her paper for paper piecing, it's strong for sewing and tears away very nicely. Pictures will be taken of finished quilts -- all quilted and backed and labeled. We're never too old for fun or for a snow day.

New Quilt Top

This is the quilt pattern I've been looking at as I sewed for the past three weeks. Carol Doak published it in the magazine, $100,000 Quilting Challenge, the Premier Issue. It publishes articles on and by well known teachers and designers. She's long been a favorite designer. And I liked this quilt very much.

This is Carol Doak's book that I've been using for the past three years to make paper pieced stars. The nine stars in the quilt are from this book and are not all the same ones she used in her quilt. She did not restrict herself to one color as I did - she used red and green and something very light as the background of the stars. I kept trying to balance the blues and made quite a few quarter stars that proved I needed to make different choices, in fact, I made a few half stars before I realized a combination or a star wasn't going to work and there is one complete star that I thought was okay until I photographed it and realized it just wasn't visually clear. I will not claim that the final choices are the very best either. I used fabric from my stash and did not purchase new blues for this. There are quite a few fabrics -- I haven't counted them but 10 or 12 I think.

It's a very gray day and as I complain all the time, the light is terrible in my apartment so this looks gray and the color is really yucky. Perhaps you can go back to some of the individual stars for a better idea of the color. Anyway, the whole is here, ironed, paper removed, outside border not really visible, waiting to be quilted. Actually waiting for a backing fabric. There are two possible blues in my stash but neither seem right to me so I'll look for something I like better over the weekend. I like the top -- I really like blue and white. I wished it showed true color in the photo. I think the recipient will too.

I'm seeing stars

This picture looks two-tone because there was actually ten minutes of sunlight but with sunlight comes shadow. I have 10 minutes of 8 inches of sun -- these squares are 12 inches so ...

I was so knocked out by my fights with the stars yesterday I soothed myself in the early-ish evening with a long, lovely soak in the tub. Then sat down to start a new ]to me] book by Mary Lee Settle, a very favorite author; but I was so exhausted my eyes kept closing and I barely got through three pages before I gave up utterly and settled happily beneath the quilt currently on my bed and was sound asleep somewhat before 10:00.

However, I was awake before 5:00 and really feeling bright eyed and bushy tailed after coffee at 5:15 so I washed my dishes and my face and attacked the star I left half done. Too hastily. The quarter of it I made was mirror image of what it should be -- I don't know how I managed that! I said a few choice words a lady of my vintage isn't supposd to know, chucked the whole thing because I then decided the colors weren't as balanced as they should be. When I was about to start the second quarter of the new version the phone rang. Someone else trying to convince me I need a new credit card so I can single handedly perk up the sadly failing American econony, thought I. But no, at last it was the office manager telling me to come in to work. Hurray! Respite!

When I got home I returned to the unfinished star and polished it off handily before dinner. I decided that the lower of the two stars in yesterday's photos will have to be remade -- it IS much easier to make the second than the first. The two prints in the middle of that one bleed, visually, into each other too much. I'll use a plain-ish lighter fabric in the middle. That will be tomorrow's assignment. Then I'll have a total of six finished and only three more to go. The remainder of the quilt will be a snap -- truely! I'll show a pix in a day or two.