2013 Challenge Quilt — Solids!

Bright color camouflage! Can you find the hidden child?

Once again, part of why my blog went dark in the latter part of last year was that I couldn’t show you what I was primarily working on. This year’s challenge was announced in May and was solid fabrics, at least six different shades/hues. My initial reaction was very negative:  basically, “eww, I’m not doing that!” After all, the fabrics I love are prints and batiks, and I have a houseful of them. Doing a solid fabric challenge would entail buying new fabric at a time when I’m desperately trying to use up my stash, as my stash decidedly lacks solids.

Finley helped me assess my feather coverage partway through the quilting.

However, when I told my mom about the challenge and how much I was NOT inspired by it, two things happened. First, she reminded me that the first quilts I fell in love with, the quilts that inspired me to start quilting, and indeed my first several quilts, were all made of solid fabrics. And second, she gave me a bag of twelve solid half-yards for my birthday. I subsequently added some neutrals, and the game was afoot. Besides, in retrospect, if my reaction to a challenge is “eww!” then that suggests that it really will be a challenge, not just an excuse to make a quilt I would’ve made anyway.

Early on in the process, I decided that the biggest advantage working with solids would give me is how well quilting shows up on solid fabric. Therefore, I wanted to keep the piecing simple. Since I love pinwheels, and have been planning for years to make a quilt that incorporates different sizes of pinwheels, I settled on the idea of making a quilt similar to this one of Kaffe Fassett‘s:

From _Country Garden Quilts_

I started the cutting at my mini-retreat in late July with Rhonda and Diane, and didn’t really work up a strict plan. I decided to just run all the solid fabric through my Accuquilt GO! cutter (after all, I really wasn’t looking to start a solid stash) and make the quilt however big it turned out. I had a lot of fun cranking out all those triangles. I then paired them off into blocks using my standard concept of quilt entropy, trying to get the colors as mixed up as possible. I don’t know whether I will ever be capable of leaving things up to chance sufficiently to make a “brown bag” quilt, but I did have fun free-associating about the various bright color combinations:  green and purple is the Hulk, orange and fuchsia is the beach, red and brown is a robin, yellow and purple is Easter. The colors all coordinate with one another because there are so many of them; as Alex Anderson says, if the colors in your quilt aren’t going together, add more colors and they will.

You know you’re really chain piecing when you can barely see the baby

I sewed all the large 12″ blocks together and had paired up the triangles for the 6″ blocks when I realized I’d goofed. In the original quilt, the smaller blocks are 1/3 the size of the larger blocks, not 1/2. Oops. Time for a new plan. I liked the idea of keeping the center of the quilt set on point, so I just sewed the large blocks together and planned on making the smaller blocks into a border. And that’s when I got seriously sidetracked with other projects (they’re in the next post.) That’s also when I fully internalized just how large a quilt (84″ x 84″!) I was ending up with, which hadn’t really been in the plan.

Just the center

The primary problem with having the challenge meeting in January is that I didn’t get back to the challenge quilt until after Christmas:  even though we actually had more time between the announcement of the challenge and the meeting, I would have had to have the quilt virtually finished before Thanksgiving to have truly been on-time with it, and my brain doesn’t work that way. I very nearly packed it in and turned it into another UFO, but Dan was my cheerleader and encouraged me to finish it. Fortunately, the rest of the quilt top went together smoothly and the children more or less cooperated to get me some sewing time.

Some days, this is what cooperation looks like

I wound up working in Danville, PA for a military dental event the weekend before the guild meeting, so I made certain I had the quilt basted and the quilting started before I left so I could get some dedicated quilting time in my motel room. I made the most of it and had the entire outer border and 1/4 of the center quilted by the time I got home. Once again, working under deadline really helped me make decisions as to what quilting designs went where. Feathers are favorites of mine to stitch without a great deal of marking and they always look fancy, so I put Patsy Thompson-style soft heart feathers in the outer border and Kimmy Brunner “twirly whirly” feathers in the center. I was able to get away with only marking the spines in all cases; the seam lines for the borders and the X through the center gave me all the other guidelines I needed. This was definitely not a project for subtlety, so I used neon green Brytes by Superior Threads for all of it. I managed to get the remainder of the center quilted and the outside edge zigzagged and trimmed in time for the meeting, so even though it wasn’t finished, it was finished-ish.

Before and after hyperquilting

The inner border was reserved for my fanciest quilting, since it would show the best there. I think it also helped me finish this quilt, as I was really looking forward to quilting that border; otherwise, I probably would have lost momentum once the meeting was past and I no longer had a deadline. I rewatched Patsy Thompson’s Free-Motion Fun with Feathers Vol. 4 DVD again for inspiration and quilted a hyperquilted, symmetrical border flowing from corner motifs that started as Quilter’s Rule Dragon Scales template and evolved from there.

Detail, corner quilting design

I used orange Brytes for the original feather and hyperquilted it with Superior Threads Metallic in variegated gold. I also shook up my standard machine binding protocol to add a little more embellishment by trading the stitching in the ditch for a decorative stitch in a variegated King Tut:

Detail, binding stitching

What would I do differently? Well, much as I love wool batting, it definitely increased the difficulty level on this quilt. I think as long as I’m quilting on my home machine, I need to reserve wool for the smaller projects. It doesn’t spray baste as nicely as the cotton blends, and I got more pleats and tucks on the back than usual. I didn’t have any problems with skipped stitches or shredded threads (even with the Metallic! That stuff worked like a charm and I will most certainly be using it more often from here on out) but I had more “nests” on the back than I normally do. I’m not sure why. I didn’t let it stop me (another benefit of being on a strict deadline) but I will be keeping my eye out for future problems along these lines and possible causes/solutions.

For a happy dance, I’m mining the classic movie musicals again. The bright colors in this quilt made me think of the old movies that would advertise being shot “in Glorious TECHNICOLOR!” including “On The Town.” Enjoy!

Did I Just Make A Modern Quilt?

I made this quilt for my youngest sister’s baby boy, who is expected any minute now:

Eleanore isn’t a quilter, but she has a very good eye for color and design; the fact that she’s decorated the nursery in mushroom gray with accents of orange testifies that the standard blue, green, and cream baby quilt wasn’t going to cut it for her. I found the big border stripe (aptly named “Big Stripe,” from Michael Miller) at Smile Spinners‘ booth at Quilt Odyssey and used it as the source for the overall color palette. The solid orange, the gray and aqua ant farm print, the border, and the back were the only new fabrics purchased for the project; the rest were all pulled from my stash, demonstrating that a) I have a fantastic stash, especially where orange, taupe-y gray, and cute little animal prints are concerned, and b) that I have wa-a-a-ay too much fabric.

It wasn’t till I finished the top that it occurred to me that this quilt, moreso than any other I’ve ever made, looks an awful lot like the quilts I’ve been seeing in books and magazines described as “modern” quilts. Which leads me to a bit of a sticking point for me over the past few years:  I’m not exactly sure what a “modern” quilt is.

[From this point forward in this post, I’ve decided to capitalize the word Modern when referring to this concept because part of my problem with the term up to this point is the ambiguity of it:  no matter what my quilts look like, I myself (and all my quilting contemporaries) are modern quilters, in that we are definitely 21st century women who choose to participate in a fiber art form that dates back several hundred years, but we do so not as historical reenactors, but as full participants in our culture as it exists now, using the tools and technologies that would have been science fiction to our foremothers. I realize this is a matter of semantics; after all, some “modern” art is now well over 100 years old, yet we still use the term. But I admit it rankles me to potentially exclude myself from the umbrella of modernity because I choose to make quilts, albeit on a computerized sewing machine with all the latest in gadgetry, that follow a more traditional structure. And using quotation marks makes me look snarky or sarcastic.]

In search of a definition, I went to the source. Here’s what the Modern Quilt Guild has to say on the subject:

“Modern quilts are primarily functional and inspired by modern design. Modern quilters work in different styles and define modern quilting in different ways, but several characteristics often appear which may help identify a modern quilt. These include, but are not limited to: the use of bold colors and prints, high contrast and graphic areas of solid color, improvisational piecing, minimalism, expansive negative space, and alternate grid work.”

From this definition, I get the impression that even self-described Modern quilters tend to differ a little bit in what they call Modern.  I definitely recognize that Modern quilters may somewhat be separating themselves out as a generational or attitudinal divide, especially as Modern Quilt Guild chapters spring up around the country. I’ve heard enough horror stories about quilters who are younger or new to an area that has a very rigid, insular quilt guild being frozen out or run off by Quilt Police types; if the solution to that is to start your own chapter of quilters who share a wish to breathe some fresh air into that environment. then more power to them.

But ultimately, I guess I’m too much of a quilting generalist to want to limit myself to one label, whether it be traditional, Modern, art, etc. I guess I’m a big tent quilter:  I believe quilting is big enough that there’s room for whatever you or I like to do, even if we wouldn’t want to trade projects with each other. I’m reminded of the saying, attributed to Louis Armstrong (among others), that “there are only two kinds of music, good and bad.” So while I’m not willing to place a label on what I like, I know when I like it.

And I like this quilt, that I made for my nephew. It has some Modern elements, with the solid orange. negative space, and large graphic prints, but it uses the Tumbler shape, which is very traditional. I used my Accuquilt Go cutter with the Mini Tumbler and Baby, Baby dies, which definitely sped up both the cutting and piecing process. Those precise shapes and engineered corners meant everything went together beautifully with very little pinning. So far, the cutter continues to live up to its “better cuts make better quilts” hype and I continue to be very pleased with the purchase.

I got a little fancy and fussy with the Big Stripe border. I knew I wanted those gorgeous mitered corners, but with a rectangular quilt, it took some doing to make the same spot in the repeat show up in the corners. I had to very precisely measure and invisibly piece the stripe so the corners reflected properly, but it was worth the effort and I get a little thrill of pride looking at it.

The quilting was fun:  I knew nothing would really show up in the pieced areas, so I just used Wendy Sheppard’s Jester Hat texture. Considering this was the first time I’d stitched it, it flowed very naturally and I only got “stuck” a few times. I used Superior Threads Rainbows #812 Western Sunset, which coincidentally contained most of the colors in my palette, for that and for the little serpentine/sine waves I quilted into the colored stripes of the border. I used orange Bottom Line to quilt the solid orange section behind the duckies in waves and circles; I wanted it to look like a bubble bath.

And I had the quilt finished for the baby shower! It almost made me look like one of those organized quilters who thinks ahead. However, I’m not quite done with the baby quilt for my sister-in-law’s baby girl who was born last month, so I don’t have to worry about that reputation sticking.

For a happy dance, here’s a ducky video I shot at the York Fair a few years ago. It seems apropos:

Finished! Denim Rag Quilt

The way we get around, we need rugged quilts!

This was a fun little project.

Denim rag quilt, 40″ x 40″

My mom and I had taken a class, probably ten years ago, on flannel rag quilts at Ladyfingers. I’m not even sure where that project bag is at this point. Suffice to say, I was not a fan. The instructor kept emphasizing how this was a quilt for people who didn’t care about accuracy, that “anything goes” with rag quilts, and if things didn’t line up, don’t worry because it wouldn’t matter. And while this approach may set some beginning quilters at ease, it was simply not what I wanted to hear at that stage of my quilting journey. I was just starting to feel like a decently competent piecer, achieving a fairly consistent 1/4″ seam and matching my intersections most of the time. The last thing I needed was a project in which precision was not only NOT a goal, it was a liability. (The ridiculous stretchiness of the flannel I was using meant that nothing stayed square, straight, or remotely the same size, even with a walking foot.) Throw in the fact that I was really not looking forward to clipping all those seams once the darn thing was finished, and this was a project born to become a UFO.

*Little bit of a tangent here:  although the instructor for the flannel rag quilt class was very nice and very competent as an instructor, it was clear she and I were not on the same quilting wavelength. While we were working on our squares, she talked about how she designs quilts for fabric companies, incorporating entire lines of fabric for them. All well and good and very interesting. However, she then went on to say that she plans everything out in advance for all her quilts, not just those, and that she has NO STASH. Let that sink in for a minute. In fact, she said she had recently purchased 3 yards of a fabric that she planned to use as a border, and when it became clear that it would not indeed work as the border for this particular quilt, she was very upset because “now what am I going to do with it?” I absolutely could not relate.

After that experience, I can confidently state that I had given absolutely no thought to ever making another rag quilt until I started researching the purchase of my GO! cutter. Accuquilt makes rag dies that precut the fringes on the edges of the squares so that all you have to do is sew the blocks together and then wash the quilt:  no hand-crippling, mind-numbing seam clipping to do! I still was in no hurry to work with flannel again, but I knew I had a stack of Dan’s worn-out jeans in the basement that were guilt-tripping me and making me feel like a hoarder, and the wheels started turning.

A stack of die cut squares, 8.5″ jeans and 6.5″ batting

I had started saving the jeans after seeing a show on DIY or HGTV in which they discussed sustainable building practices including the use of recycled denim to make housing insulation. On the show, they promoted a recycling program that was doing drives throughout the country to collect the jeans. However, by the time I had any to contribute, the website said that drives were temporarily suspended for the year, and would I like to get on an email list for when they restarted? I did, but that was an email that never came. Since then, the only comparable program I’ve been able to find is Cotton: From Blue to Green, which only accepts mail-in denim donations. And they’re in Phoenix. I can’t imagine how expensive it would be to ship a big cardboard box of jeans to Phoenix, and I can’t imagine the carbon footprint of that decision would end up being particularly sustainable. So the jeans sat in my basement.

I had seen a magazine photo several years ago of a large denim picnic quilt, but had dismissed the idea for my own projects because the denim would be so heavy and difficult to work with. The die cutting definitely solved part of the problem; I had initially envisioned making the quilt much larger, but I only had six pairs of jeans to work with. (I think there are more in the basement somewhere, but these were the ones I could put my hands on.) In the event, I was fortunate to have the size limited by the amount of materials, because the 6 x 6 block quilt was heavy enough that my arms felt fatigued after putting it through the machine to join the last rows together.

I love the idea of a denim quilt for outdoors. I don’t scruple to take my regular quilts outside; I made them for my kids and I would rather they use and enjoy them, even if it means the quilts occasionally get a little dirty or abraded. However, a denim quilt is durable, HEAVY (having trouble keeping the child in bed? Lay one of these puppies on top of him!) and only improves with washing and wear, so it’s a natural for more rough-and-tumble settings. We really enjoyed attending some of the free outdoor family movies shown in Farquhar Park this summer, and quilts always came with us.

This one got to make its useful debut as a roll-around quilt for Finley as we ate our picnic lunch at Knoebel’s:

As to the actual construction of the quilt, I “deboned” the jeans, cutting each pair with dressmaker’s shears into two leg fronts and two leg backs by just cutting along the seam lines. I then removed the fly and the back pockets. (I had wanted to keep the pockets on the squares and thus have some blocks with usable pockets on the quilt, but the pockets on these jeans were too large and too close to the back yoke seam for that to work on this project. A future quilt made with different jeans, perhaps some of Ronan’s, will have pockets.) I then fed the resulting long denim pieces through the die cutter, only cutting one layer at a time since the fabric is so heavy. While cutting the squares individually and having to pull denim threads out of the die after each cut made this process much more time consuming than the typical die-cut project, it was still orders of magnitude faster than cutting all those fringes by hand. I was able to get 14 8.5″ squares (6.5″ finished due to the 1″ seam allowance), or 7 blocks, from each pair of jeans. Although there were plenty of oddly-shaped scraps that couldn’t be utilized for this project, I was also able to save 4 pieces (including the 2 back pockets) from each pair big enough to cut a 5.25″ rag square from once I purchase that die.

I was able to die cut the 6.5″ batting squares as well; this is a perfect project for using up those long odd leftover pieces of batting. I also cut 6 squares of the orange batik, and then  die cut the Funky Flower out of the corresponding denim squares for a raggy reverse applique. I used a cute primary variegated YLI Jeans Stitch I’d had for years for the quilting, simple X’s in the plain blocks and echo quilting around the flowers. I used the walking foot for the quilting, but I found I had to switch back to my regular foot for joining the blocks because I skipped too many stitches otherwise. All those layers of denim are no joke:  I even broke two #100 denim needles on this project.

The amount of lint when I washed it was ridiculous. I had heard that you should always clean the dryer lint filter mid-cycle when washing a flannel rag quilt. However, even pulling this one out of the washer involved handfuls of wet lint and a moment of panic that the whole quilt might have somehow disintegrated in the wash cycle.

This is not even all of the denim lint.

Now to wrap this post up on an appropriately bizarre note, my sister Eleanore sent me the following text yesterday morning:

And some people think quilting is a boring hobby for mousy little homebodies. I like to think I’m keeping them guessing.

I Got An AccuQuilt GO! Cutter!

And just like Finley here, I’m so excited about my toy!

I had heard a lot about the GO! cutter when it first came out, because Alex Anderson and Ricky Tims are spokespeople for it, with promotional videos on The Quilt Show site. While I’ve long been intrigued by fabric die cutters, ever since first visiting the fabulous home quilting studio of a guild friend who has the Accuquilt Studio cutter, I didn’t really think of it as being a priority item for me. I thought maybe it might be worthwhile for someone who does an awful lot of applique, but I don’t, and on the odd occasion when I do, I tend to design my own. So while I was glad to know there were die cutters in the world, I didn’t really covet one.

Until… I had stopped by The Finishing Stitch on my way home from a wedding the day before Mother’s Day, and they had a Studio cutter and dies for sale for $600, listed as a $1500 value. A discount that steep is always going to pique my interest, but Finley was getting fussy so I didn’t investigate in depth. However, I started thinking about it more on the way home, and therefore spent some time on the Accuquilt website over the rest of the weekend. The main thing that I learned was how many piecing dies are available. As I am primarily a piecer, and cutting fabric has always struck me as tedious, this was very intriguing. Although a separate die is necessary for each different size or shape, I certainly tend to use certain shapes and sizes repeatedly in my projects (2″ finished half-square triangles certainly spring to mind.) And the idea, reiterated over and over on the website, that die cutting is “up to 90% faster than rotary cutting,” was extremely attractive to a full-time-working mom of two children under 3.

After all, although I know it’s an all-too-temporary stage, I don’t have a whole lot of free time to quilt right now. It’s a trade-off I’m more than happy to make to be involved in Ronan’s and Finley’s young childhood, but I don’t want to completely swear off quilting right now. (And several of the quilts I’ve made in the last few years have been for them, and they enjoy using them!) So anything that speeds the process without decreasing my artistic freedom or my enjoyment of the process is a good thing. I have no interest in using pre-cut kits because my favorite part of quilting is selecting the fabrics, but if I can choose my own fabric and then fast forward to the construction stage without spending such a long time cutting the fabric into pieceable shapes, I will get a lot more done. Additionally, I haven’t wanted to do much cutting when Ronan is awake, because I have an absolute paranoia that he could get hold of the rotary cutter. While there are still blades in the die boards, he would have to do handstands on them in order to hurt himself with them.

So Monday morning, I called Jean… and she told me that she was sorry, she should have taken the signs down, because she was selling the Studio cutter to the new owner of the shop as part of the shop sale. Having just spent the last 36 hours convincing myself that I desperately wanted this thing, it was definitely a letdown. But like Aesop’s fox with the grapes, I quickly recovered by realizing that the Studio would not have been the right choice for me. While it can cut more layers at once, and the dies are more numerous, varied, and larger, the dies are more expensive and the cutter requires a dedicated space, as it is heavy and does not fold up. It really seems like the good folks at Accuquilt really thought about all the factors that prevent quilters from buying a Studio cutter, and designed the GO! to meet those needs. I took my time researching the products and prices (another GO! advantage, as the Studio and its dies are only available through Accuquilt), then finally pulled the trigger in mid-July.

My GO! came in the mail July 23, the Tuesday before my mini-retreat at my house with Rhonda and Diane. I bought it from quilting-warehouse.com which offers significant discounts (30-50%) on the GO! and several selected dies, and although the shipping was expensive and the order took longer than their stated estimate to process, I cannot complain in light of the overall value. I got the 12″ block “mix and match” bundle, which is a collection of eight dies for shapes commonly found in 12″ pieced blocks. I also got some extra cutting mats, the 8.5″ rag square, which precuts the fringes for rag quilts (more on that later), the Funky Flower applique shape, and the 3.5″ mini tumbler, since I’m getting a new niece and a new nephew this fall who will each be in need of a baby quilt. With shipping, this all came to less than $450; accuquilt.com lists the cutter with the 12″ bundle alone at $581.90.

I spent all my work time at the retreat cutting:  I cut almost all the pieces for the 2011 Shop Hop blocks; cut down several pairs of Dan’s old worn-out jeans to make a denim rag quilt; and cut 17.5 yards of solids into triangles for the guild challenge this winter. Although I didn’t get to work uninterrupted (see above re: two children under 3), I estimate that it took me less than 3 hours to cut all that solid fabric, so I stand convinced.

This happened within minutes of taking the picture above. Technology may change, but some other things never do.

I’ve only started piecing the shapes I cut, so I can’t say anything definitive, but so far the accuracy seems excellent. There’s definitely a learning curve to using the cutter, but I’ve caught on quickly. And if using it means I get to spend more of my admittedly limited time on the parts of quilting I enjoy more than cutting fabric, I’m all for it.

Next up, a project I’ve already started and completed with my GO!

FINISHED!!! Finley’s Quilt

Finley on her quilt, Nixon Park, 6/22/13

I managed to finish Finley’s quilt before she was four months old!

Finley’s Quilt, 2013, 53″ x 53″

I can technically claim I started this quilt while in the process of giving birth to her. When I was in a holding pattern at Labor and Delivery, hooked up to the monitors with my IV started, I found myself all worked up with nothing to do. I had filled out all the forms they had given me; I had handed off my phone to Dan so it wouldn’t go missing (no pockets in a hospital gown, go figure); and I had no one to talk to, because Dan and my parents were working out the logistics of who would be with Ronan at various points throughout the day’s events. So, to keep myself amused and centered, I started to do math longhand.

I had seen this Rolling Stone quilt (Emeralds, by Mary Fons) on the cover of Fons and Porter’s Love of Quilting magazine, and thought it would be perfect. I wanted to use stash fabric, and I didn’t have an appropriate focus print handy like I had for Ronan’s quilt. However, I didn’t want to make it exactly as written, because as I’ve stated previously, I try to avoid the “corner cutter” methods when possible; I find them to be wasteful of fabric, and I’m an accurate enough piecer for my purposes that I don’t need to avoid cutting triangles. So I did my calculations for the pieces I would need to cut, and kept my mind largely occupied until they were ready to wheel me to the operating room.

Needless to say, I didn’t start to actually cut and piece the quilt until Finley was a few weeks old. Since I was making thirteen blocks, I pulled twenty-six pink and purple fabrics from my stash and cut 2 rectangles and 2 square-in-a-square pieces from each. Then from half of them, I cut an additional square for the block centers. I cut the background triangles and rectangles from eight light taupe fabrics, and then pieced everything together into component units. I didn’t plan the individual blocks until I had already pieced all the square-in-a-square units and rectangle squares, so when I laid out the blocks (my favorite part!) I couldn’t always achieve my goal of keeping similar fabrics as far apart from one another as possible. Still, most of the blocks avoid repeating fabrics.

That’s not it…

Originally, I had imagined using another light taupe for the setting triangles, but when I actually tried it on the design wall, it really washed out the blocks. From there I tried a taupe and wasabi green floral on a light background, and if anything, that was worse. But that inspired me to try a very odd fabric that I’d bought some time ago to coordinate with some of my dark taupes that had wasabi green highlights. It’s from the Odyssea collection by Moda, and as soon as I put it up on the design wall with the blocks I knew I had a winner.

That’s it!

The only downside was that I didn’t have enough for the corner triangles. However, even that became an opportunity because it gave me a place for applique. This was the only new fabric I bought for this quilt, as I didn’t have a tone-on-tone or solid in the same green. Searching for that was the impetus behind Finley’s and my first Mommy-daughter trip to the fabric store.

She was great until I got to the cutting table, then melted down.

I appliqued Finley’s initials, as I had done with Ronan’s quilt, in the upper left corner, and used the remaining three corners for her birthdate and two swirly hearts based on the design on a yoga t-shirt I have. In the interests of time I just did fusible applique with a mini zigzag in matching thread, and then quilted the daylights out of them. Those appliques are not going anywhere.

Applique detail, Finley’s Quilt

I managed to finish piecing the quilt before my maternity leave ended April 8th and I went back to work. I used the rejected taupe and green floral for the back (after all, it matches!) using the remnants of the green from the corners and a rejected green pin dot to stretch it to fit. The quilting was a mix of my old standbys and some new techniques; I did freehand flowers and leaves in the pink and purple rectangles and square-in-a-squares. I wanted to emphasize the illusion of circles created by the straight line piecing of the Rolling Stone block, so I quilted freehand feather wreaths in the center of each block, marking only the circular spines. I then filled in the other background shapes with pebble filler. I quilted the setting triangles with a 60-degree grid of serpentine lines, using the centers of the flowers in the fabric print as my guides. The corners got freehand mini Baptist fans with strings of pearls in the applique.

Quilting detail, Finley’s Quilt

I left the center squares unquilted, both to avoid obscuring the print and because I couldn’t decide what the best design for them would be. I’ve been heavily influenced lately by Wendy Sheppard’s Ivory Spring quilting blog; she does gorgeous, creative, prolific work on a domestic sewing machine. She frequently leaves much larger pieced areas unquilted than I’m used to seeing, adjacent to elaborately quilted designs, so I thought I could do a lot worse than to emulate this in my own work. As of now, I think it’s successful! And there’s the additional advantage that if at any future point I change my mind, I can always add more quilting. After all, I learned my lesson from Alice in Wonderland:

`I’ve had nothing yet,’ Alice replied in an offended tone, `so I can’t take more.’

`You mean you can’t take LESS,’ said the Hatter: `it’s very easy to take MORE than nothing.’

I finished the quilt with a binding with inserted rickrack, using Susan Cleveland‘s technique, as I thought it added an appropriate element of whimsy.

Quilting and binding detail, Finley’s Quilt

And the quilt was done in time for Show & Tell at the June quilt guild meeting, a full week before Finley turned four months old. I think a happy dance is in order, don’t you?

I’ve gone to the Silly Symphonies well before for these video links, and this one from 1933 is esthetically beautiful, delightfully bizarre and, appropriately for this post, baby themed:

Another Shop Hop Quilt, 2008, Part 1

“Everyone seated? Then let’s begin.”

[Editor’s Note:  I started this post in January, while working on this quilt top. However, due to major recent life events named Finley, I delayed finishing it. The top has been done since before she was born, so although I think I changed all the time references to reflect that they happened in the past, if I missed any and it sounds weird, that’s why.]

I was very proud to finish my 2007 Shop Hop quilt, Liddle Lamzy Divey, in time for our guild show in June 2012:

Liddle Lamzy Divey (2007 Shop Hop quilt,) 2010

However, spending time with that set of blocks brought painfully to mind the fact that sitting behind them in my studio closet were the block kits from the 2008, 2009, and 2011 Eastern PA Shop Hops. And of course, in November my mom, Ronan, and I completed the 2012 Shop Hop, which meant I brought home yet another set of block kits. So when considering which piecing project I should bring to the guild retreat last December, I loaded up all four years’ worth of kits.

Of course, I had grand ideas of entering some sort of cutting and piecing flow state in which I would power through multiple years’ kits and leave with stacks and stacks of completed blocks. Naturally, reality was far different. I decided to start with the 2008 blocks, which were from the English Rose collection by Jo Morton for Andover Fabrics. Once again, although I am pleased with the result so far, this was not a collection or color palette I would have instinctively been drawn to. The focus print, an extremely large-scale floral featuring huge overblown cabbage roses, is just not my style at all, and the resulting palette, heavy on the hunter greens and burgundies, just strikes me as dull, dark, and dreary. The individual coordinating prints, however, are very attractive and varied, including a couple colorways of an interesting triangular leaf print, some Dimples, a really unusual curvy coral stripe (my favorite fabric in the collection,) and some smaller floral prints. And fortunately, the blocks themselves were designed with a nicely balanced amount of light cream background, and enough of the quilts at the individual shops featured light sashing or borders that kept them from getting ponderous. (Otherwise, I wouldn’t have chosen to invest in the kits.)

Here’s a gallery of the shop quilts (as always, click to enlarge):

Sew Smart Fabrics, Doylestown, PA

At Piece Quiltery, Easton, PA

Quilt Back, At Piece Quiltery, Easton, PA

Allentown Sewing Machine Outlet, Allentown, PA

Wooden Bridge Drygoods, Kutztown, PA

The Quiltery, Weissport, PA

The Country Quilterie, Effort, PA

Side 1, Pocono Sew & Vac, East Stroudsburg, PA

Side 2, Pocono Sew & Vac, East Stroudsburg, PA

American Ribbon Outlet, East Stroudsburg, PA

J&B Fabrics, Nescopeck, PA

118 Fabrics and More, Sweet Valley, PA

Endless Mountains Quiltworks, Tunkhannock, PA

Quilting in the Valley, Hegins, PA

The Happy Sewing Room, Hamburg, PA

The Quilters’ Palette, Fleetwood, PA

Ladyfingers Sewing Studio, Oley, PA

I had started cutting the fabrics for the blocks several years ago, shortly after finishing the 2007 blocks, but got bogged down in the planning. The block kits are extremely generous, including fat eighths (9″ x 22″) of each fabric called for in the block, which is why I ended up with all those flying geese for the vertical borders of Liddle Lamzy Divey. However, such largesse doesn’t mean I want to waste fabric unnecessarily, and the block instructions are all written for people who prefer to avoid cutting triangles:  all half-square-triangle squares are done via the “easy sandwich method” with the drawn diagonal line, and all flying geese units are done using the “stitch and flip method” with a rectangle, 2 squares, and leftover “bonus triangles.”  I have tried these methods and found them to be, in my hands, no more precise (in fact, sometimes less so) than cutting the triangles, especially when I use rulers such as the Easy Angle and the Fons & Porter Flying Geese ruler. Plus, the rulers allow me to cut my triangles from strips with nice, normal, non- +7/8″ measurements, and give me pretrimmed triangle points resulting in fewer dogears.

Contrary to my initial attempt, rather than trying to come up with a Grand Unified Theory of Everything where I came up with a master list of every shape and size that needed to be cut, I pulled out all the instruction sheets and cut the components for each block separately, but from a single pool of fabrics. This may have taken a little longer, but the vast majority of shapes could be cut from 2 1/2″ strips, so it was fairly simple to keep everything organized, and I was left with roughly 4 3/4 total yards of leftover fabric, in fat eighths, after all the blocks were kitted up. More on what I did with that later.

The blocks themselves were significantly less varied in their design than the 2007 blocks. In fact, there were really only three basic variations:  whether the corners were a standard four-patch, a four-patch with 2 squares and 2 half-square triangle squares, or a Birds in the Air unit . The closest analogue for the basic block I could find in the Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns by Barbara Brackman was BB1661, “Big T.”

All blocks shared the other elements of a central 4″ square of the large floral focus print surrounded along its sides by units consisting of a 2″ x 4″ rectangle sewn to a 2″ x 4″ flying geese unit. However, this apparent simplicity was contradicted by how much variation was introduced by subtle changes in the position of those flying geese, and by varying the value and fabric choices. From a distance, all you see in these Shop Hop quilts are samplers:  you have to really study to see just how similar the piecing is. I had mentioned briefly in an earlier post that it would be interesting to do a quilt of “piecing twin” blocks where the piecing was all the same but the blocks looked different from one another due to fabric and value placement. Well, without trying to, I’ve now made that quilt.

There were 16 blocks that year, fifteen shops plus the kit that came with the passport. And despite working on them for pretty much all retreat weekend, I didn’t quite finish them all. (Needless to say, none of the other years’ kits even came out of the bag.) But the blocks were finished within a few days of the retreat’s end, and I decided to keep it simple and just do a straight 4×4 set with light sashing and cornerstones made from the large floral focus print:

Center, 2008 Shop Hop quilt

This was a particularly tricky set of blocks to lay out, as I wanted to not only distribute the most eye-catching fabrics evenly across the quilt surface, but also keep blocks of overly-similar construction away from each other, and keep the three different colors of Dimples fabrics used in the corners of each block assorted. Ultimately, I made the corner colors my primary guide, and did my best with the other two considerations. As the top hung on my design wall, I had some mild regrets on some of the block placements I chose, but not enough to rip anything out. And the fancy borders I put on will probably be distracting enough to keep me from obsessing much longer on the blocks. More to come!

Still Here, Still Quilting!

I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth! Even with a 2 1/2 year old and a 3 month old, I’m still managing to get into the studio from time to time — even if some of that time is spent buried under children:

After all, sometimes the planets align such that they’re both asleep at the same time. And now that Ronan’s old enough to be trusted to explore the button tin, we can frequently spend time in the studio together without him defaulting to his standard behaviors of pushing buttons on the sewing machine, unplugging the sewing machine, turning off the power strip, pulling out the knee lift lever…

Even Finley sometimes hangs out in there with me like a little friend:

So what have I been doing with my quilting time? I have made a quilt for Finley; I’m just now getting the binding handsewn to the back, so it will be the topic of a future post. Here’s a preview:

I’ve also been playing with a technique from Anita Grossman Solomon’s Rotary Cutting Revolution. She’s the visionary who developed the Unbiased Block that I used in Alexander’s quilt last year. I caught up on a bunch of The Quilt Show episodes while up in the middle of the night with Finley those first few weeks, and the episode where she’s the guest just set the cogs turning. I’ll be featuring that quilt-in-progress in its own post soon, but you’ll get a sneak peek at it if you watch my video.

Because I also just made a technique video that I posted to YouTube on how to use Quilter’s Rule’s nested square rulers to square up quilt blocks:

The “X-Centric” block from Anita’s book calls for squaring up the component blocks to 7.5″, and that is just not a size that exists from the standard ruler sources. But these nested squares from Quilter’s Rule have a lot of potential. I got them at their booth at the Quilters Unlimited show last weekend, when Finley and I met Diane there. It was a great show as usual, with lots of quilts and vendors of high enough quality (in both categories) to make the drive worthwhile. Here are some highlights (click to enlarge):

Detail, Vertigo by Suzie Buck

Detail, Rings and Things by Kay A. Lettau

Detail, Fade to Red by Martha Bush

Detail, Trains by Amy S. Lancaster

Detail, Winding Ways by Shirley R. Winn

Detail, Beauty of the Old Dominion by Amy Flenniken

Detail, Quilting the Bases by Dian Epp

Detail, Ribbon Stars in Taupe by Martha Bush

Detail, Black and White and Cats All Over by Judy Kozlowski

When Flowers Party by Linda T. Cooper

I also succumbed to buying (gasp) full price fabric! Alexander Henry struck again, designing what I referred to in an overexcited text to my mom as “quite possibly the best fabric ever produced.” While that may have been laying it on a little thick, my inner goth girl rejoiced at this fabric, called “After Dark”:

That black widow spider is 12.5″ tall.

From a practical standpoint, I do have TWO people in my regular gift-giving rotation who are hardcore Edgar Allen Poe aficionados. This was one of many featured fabrics at the Some Art Fabric booth that I could have happily wrapped myself in yards of, but at $12.45 a yard (I wince as I type) I was able to restrain myself.

So I have one quilt (Finley’s) all but finished, another top (2008 Shop Hop blocks!) completed, a third (Christmas X-centric blocks) well under way, and they just announced the challenge (solids) at guild last month. And that’s not addressing any of the UFOs! Oh well. At least I’m sewing, creating, and enjoying the process, which is far more important than finishing anything at this stage in my life.

I just have to finish convincing myself of that.

Eastern PA Shop Hop 2012

Ronan strikes a pose on the Shop Hop

Once again, my mom, Ronan and I did the Eastern PA Shop Hop the first 2 weekends in November. There were only 11 shops this year, as Jeannette from Endless Mountains Quiltworks in Tunkhannock decided not to participate in favor of a new hop in southern New York state. I was sad not to go there, since it has been one of my favorite shops since I first discovered it on the shop hop many years ago, and especially because we missed The Airing of the Quilts this year since it fell the same day as my youngest sister’s wedding. However, the shorter list of shops made it more accessible to do at a leisurely pace, especially with a toddler in tow, and at least this year’s list got shorter because of a shop owner’s choice, rather than because another shop went out of business.

As with last year, I went into the shop hop with a commitment to not add to my stash unnecessarily. The only item on my actual shopping list was a backing for Alyssa’s new baby daughter Evelyn’s quilt, and even that was planned for the discount bolts. I think I did pretty well: I only bought one full price piece of fabric, and I only bought half a yard of that.

I did buy the shop hop blocks, as I really liked the color palette and it’s all batik. The line only has a few lights in it, and some of the shop quilts really demonstrate how important it is to have a range of values in your quilt. While some took advantage of those couple light prints and used them for sashing or setting triangles, others turned out muddy because they’re predominantly mediums and darks.

Pocono Sew & Vac

American Ribbon

The Country Quilterie

The Quilted Crow

118 Fabrics & More

J&B Fabrics

The Happy Sewing Room

Wooden Bridge Drygoods

At Piece Quiltery

Ladyfingers Sewing Studio

Allentown Sewing Machine Outlet

Also, while I wouldn’t buy the blocks if I didn’t like the fabrics, it does give me an easy out for a shop where I don’t feel called to buy anything else at any given shop. Yes, I know there is no price of admission for getting my passport stamped, and yes, I know not finding anything I want to buy is not usually my problem, but it does feel strange to drive all the way to a shop and then not buy something.

As much fun as I had making my Liddle Lamzy Divey quilt using only the Jo Morton line for the entire quilt, I have four years’ worth of shop hop block kits to make into quilts, and I plan to fill in what I can’t do with the generous kit leftovers with stash fabric. Much as I don’t need new projects in my life right now, I think I’m going to take my block kits to retreat with me and see how many I can knock out. I haven’t been doing much piecing lately since finishing the (grumble grumble) paper piecing for the challenge quilt, and I think it will be fun.

Anyway, we had a very good time. The weather cooperated for the most part, and so did Ronan, helped significantly by his affinity for both the smiling, friendly ladies that tend to populate quilt shops and for the cookies that so many of them had on offer. (I’m a little concerned that from here on out, he will expect all quilt shops to give him cookies whenever we go in.) We went to Pocono Sew & Vac and American Ribbon in East Stroudsburg, The Country Quilterie in Effort, and The Quilted Crow in Lehighton on Saturday, November 3; 118 Fabrics & More in Sweet Valley, J&B Fabrics in Nescopeck, and The Happy Sewing Room in Hamburg on Sunday, November 5; Wooden Bridge Drygoods in Kutztown on Saturday, November 10; and At Piece Quiltery in Easton, Allentown Sewing Machine Outlet, and Ladyfingers Sewing Studio in Oley on Sunday, November 11.

My haul…

Obviously, I did buy fabric; I just bought heavily discounted fabric. Pocono Sew & Vac, 118 Fabrics, and J&B Fabrics all had excellent sales going on certain sale fabrics, so I finished some bolts of fabrics that I thought would make good borders or backs for projects or color schemes in the pipeline. I didn’t realize until I composed this picture that I had bought so many Christmas-themed items, as I haven’t really done any Christmas quilting for myself, and it’s been several years since I’ve made any gifts. But the panel was cute, on sale, and had possibilities; the poinsettia fabric was $3/yd (!!!) and the shop model 118 Fabrics had up of the snail’s trail variation pieced santa pattern was just too cute to leave behind. I’m very excited to try out the Inspira needles I bought from Allentown Sewing Machine Outlet for free-motion quilting on the recommendation of their sewing machine guy, but the crown jewel of my hoard from this hop is the gold-plated Roxanne thimble, the correct size for my thumb, that I bought from The Happy Sewing Room for only $42! I’ve wanted to get one for my thumb for a while, since there are certain times in hand sewing where I really need to push the needle with my thumb (plus, someday I want to try Alex Anderson‘s technique for hand quilting with my thumb.) However, Dierdre McElroy hasn’t been coming to the shows I’ve been attending in recent years, and I haven’t wanted to buy one mail order at full price and have to both pay shipping and guess on the size. This one was just sitting in the little glass case as if it were waiting for me.

So, after all that driving and shopping, it’s time, as Leah Day says, to “Shut up and quilt!” I have an excellent opportunity to do exactly that at the guild retreat next weekend. More on that soon!

Orphan Block Guild Challenge

It’s always summer when you’ve got shades!

Obviously, it’s been a really long time since I posted. I had intended on taking the summer off from blogging, but I didn’t mean to let it drag so far into fall. However, Hurricane Sandy closed my office on Monday, and since the power at home stayed on, I got some good momentum going on this post before normal life resumed.

Part of what has kept me quiet was the fact that until very recently I literally couldn’t talk about the main project that has occupied me since July: the guild challenge. This year’s theme was orphan blocks. We randomly drew bags that contained anything from a single orphan block to a collection of blocks or precut pieces, and then had to make something new out of the bag’s contents. My bag had just one single block in it, and it had issues:

The original orphan block

In the plus column, it’s a 54-40-or-Fight block, which I’ve always liked the looks of but had never made; the basic color palette had promise, since purple and green are two of my favorite colors; and the fact that it was primarily made of solids meant that finding coordinating prints would be relatively simple. HOWEVER, I completely understand why this block ended up an orphan. It’s hand pieced, and the seam allowances were positively enormous, in the 1/2″ to 5/8″ range. There were rust stains, probably from being stored with needles or pins in it, and this block did not have a single 90-degree angle to its name. If I had made a block like this, I would have stopped at one, too. I salute the brave quilter who not only held onto this block for some years, but offered it up for public consumption. And I have to say, it inspired me to make something I’m very proud of, that I never would have conceived of otherwise.

My first thought was to just rip out the seams and use the individual pieces for applique. Heck, with those seam allowances, I certainly would have ended up with plenty of fabric! But ultimately, I decided I really wanted to maintain the sharp points of the original block and riff off of those for my final design.

The finished product, “Aurora Borealis,” 36″ x 36″

A brief aside regarding my conflicted relationship with foundation paper piecing. I absolutely love “sharp pointies” designs such as New York Beauty and Mariner’s Compass, and paper piecing definitely seems to be the way to go to achieve satisfactory results with these blocks. However, I really don’t enjoy the process that much. I’ve tried several different books’ and teachers’ methods for paper piecing, I’ve tried several different types of paper foundations, and I still just find it to be tedious. I don’t like sewing on paper because the presser foot slips around, I despise having to trim after each seam, and I HATE having to tear the paper off afterwards. But in order to achieve the results I want with those super-sharp points, it’s what I have to do, and I’ve made peace with that. It will just never be my favorite technique.

I’ve had a book in my collection for many years, “Quilt Mavens: Perfect Paper Piecing” by Deb Karasik and Janet Mednick, whose pictures I have (metaphorically) drooled over for as long as I’ve had it. Up until now, though, I’ve never had occasion to make any of the patterns from it. But strangely enough, their pattern “Spike Redux,” which is essentially a giant Lemoyne Star by way of the Chrysler Building, seemed to echo the sharp points of the 54-40 or Fight block while introducing new design elements. I just changed the color and value distribution to suit myself, and swapped out the corner New York Beauty-style blocks for the orphan block.

I had bought the beautiful, hand-dyed-look, gradated purple and green fabric, “Glacier Lake” by Caryl Bryer Fallert, at least eight years ago. (I found it on the enclosed porch of the old location of Endless Mountains Quiltworks, so it’s been a while.) It was love at first sight, but it’s been one of those “too good to cut” fabrics for me all these years. With this color palette pre-established, I had finally found its showcase in the big setting triangles and curving center pieces. I only had a yard and a half, so I had to cut carefully, and I only have a few scraps left after just barely having enough to make the binding, but it was the perfect fabric for the job. In fact, most of the fabrics for this project came from my stash; the only ones I had to shop for were the pale lavender and pale chartreuse, because I needed lights for value contrast, and these are not shades that naturally occur in my collection. Fortunately, my mini-retreat with Rhonda and Kathy occurred just when I was about to embark on this project, so a shopping trip to Sauder’s did the trick.

Detail, “Aurora Borealis”

The only part of the quilt that I hadn’t completely pre-planned before starting to cut fabric was the corner blocks. Initially I had considered leaving the block intact and just making three more like it (obviously machine pieced and with new fabrics), but I was concerned that wasn’t changing it enough for the spirit of the challenge. Also, having three identical blocks and one “vintage” block would probably tend to draw focus to the odd one out, like that old song from Sesame Street:

So I tried cutting the blocks in half diagonally, although I flipped the orientation after playing around on the design wall. I experienced a great deal of stress when finally rotary cutting that block, because it was the only one I had — normally the worst thing that could happen is that I’d have to recut or repiece, but the stakes were high on this! Plus, those hand-pieced seams really wanted to spring apart until I sewed across them. I had fun making my own new 54-40 or Fight block for the other two corners. I finally used the Tri-Recs ruler I’d bought years ago, and was very happy with the result.

Quilting detail, “Aurora Borealis”

For quilting designs, I mostly fell back on my old standbys:  freehand feathers in the Glacier Lake pieces and  parallel lines in the paper pieced areas. The stroke of genius was Dan’s, as he came up with the idea to quilt the corner setting triangles as if the piecing continued for complete blocks. Doing the dense pebbling filler pattern not only created contrast in the solid areas, but also gave me some additional peace of mind regarding the hand-pieced blocks, that they wouldn’t be going anywhere.

And all my work and soul-searching was very well rewarded at our guild meeting, when my quilt got the highest number of votes at the big challenge reveal! I got a lovely prize bag and the grateful satisfaction of knowing my work is appreciated by a group of quilters I love and respect so much. Priceless.

For the happy dance, I had to go with Gilles Marini’s Bollywood dance from DWTS All-Stars. It just makes me smile:

Alexander’s Quilt

“So, I see we both like quilts!”

My sister Sian had her third son, Alexander Jackson Bailey, on September 26, 2011. As they live in Massachusetts, I didn’t get to meet him until they came down for Ronan’s birthday party in November, but I sent him a set of little fleece pajamas with pumpkins on them and a pumpkin hat with matching booties. She sent me these wonderfully styled photos of him wearing them:

(By the way, both of the pretty pretty quilts in the above pictures were made by my mom.)

I had made wallhangings for each of Sian’s older sons when they were baptized, incorporating photos of them as infants.  Here’s Bruce’s, from 2004:

And Luke’s, from 2009:

As the youngest of three boys, I imagine Alexander will have quite a few hand-me-downs of clothes, books, and toys. I wanted to make sure that, even though my life circumstances have changed quite a bit since his older brothers were born, he still had a quilt from me that was made just for him and was at least the equal of the ones I’d made for his brothers.

Alexander’s Quilt, 38″ x 38″

It’s nice to have a reason to make a little quilt from time to time. My projects tend to suffer from gigantism, as regular readers well know; if I hadn’t wanted to conform to the same general size range as the other two wallhangings, who knows what this might have grown into? Especially because the block technique I had wanted to try anyway, Anita Grossman Solomon’s Unbiased Block from the April/May 2012 issue of Quilters Newsletter, turned out to be so addicting that I might have just kept going. She has you use strips of fusible interfacing on two identical squares of striped fabric to create this handy-dandy hourglass/pinwheel block that does not distort, despite the bias edges on the outside. It’s way too much fun. If you, like I, have a big collection of striped fabric, this technique is an excellent excuse to spend an afternoon playing. One pleasant surprise was that the wiggly, uneven, painterly stripes created more successful blocks to my eye than the traditional, regular stripes.

Corner detail, Alexander’s Quilt

This was entirely a stash quilt. The only purchase I made was the batting, and only because I didn’t want to cut up a queen-sized piece. Inspired by the fall colors in the photo, I pulled all the autumnal stripes from my collection and decided to make nine blocks from five different fabrics. I did have one nonstarter; while I loved this corn fabric (and it really is functionally a stripe):

No. Just no.

it was WAY too busy when I put it up on the design wall with the others. In a bed-size quilt I might have gotten away with it, but not in a small quilt like this. I wanted to use the gold fossil fern fabric for the sashing, but I didn’t have enough of it, so I used it for cornerstones and chose the orangey stone-veined fabric to pad it out. As with virtually any other instance in my quilting career where I’ve made a decision to include more fabric in a project, I think it is an improvement over my original idea. I will make it a point to use low-contrast cornerstones in future projects where I might otherwise have just used straight sashing.

Center detail, Alexander’s Quilt

Once everything was pieced, I fused the transferred photo and some simple leaf shapes and appliqued them down with a machine buttonhole stitch in a variegated heavy thread. (I’m purposely skipping over the step where I obsessed over leaf placement for multiple evenings in a row, consulting Dan to the point of exhaustion, then accidentally let the fan blow half of them off onto the floor.) I quilted an overall design of leaves and tendrils over the entire top, ignoring seam lines but tying in the appliqued leaves as if they were part of the edge-to-edge quilting design. This was the first time I’d ever done anything like this, especially freehand, and it was a fun puzzle challenge to decide on the fly what I should quilt where. It was also the first time I’d quilted details into my appliques, rather than just quilting around them or going over them with a filler pattern, and I was very pleased with the faux-trapunto result. The photo also looked much more defined with some simple outlining quilted in.

I’ve been handstitching more of my bindings lately, but this quilt got a Sew Precise, Sew Fast machine binding out of the fabric I used for the center square, and with a sleeve and label attached, it’s done in plenty of time for his June 10 baptism:

Label detail, Alexander’s Quilt

I’m still plugging away on the shop hop sampler quilt, but barring major upheaval or disaster in either the quilt or my life, it should be done for the show without necessitating any sleepless nights. I’ve also been tapped to demonstrate freehand feather quilting at the guild quilt show, so I need to gather my samples and my thoughts to prepare for that. And the guild challenge is impatiently tugging at a corner of my subconscious, asking for attention to be paid to it. The beat goes on…