Da Dresden

I *finally* finished the Dresden Plate top. My husband thinks I should completely finish this quilt before I start the next one. Silly boy! I've already started the next one! I didn't get pictures of the side borders because I couldn't get a good angle. My bedroom is really teensy. I have a queen size bed, just to give an idea of the size.

Once I got this done, I continued work on the batiks. Pix soon!

Project mania

Oh, myLANta! I have a terribly busy brain. I get a bit muddled when I have so many ideas, but I've come up with a plan that I hope I can manage. In my first post I mentioned the three main projects I have.

1. A basket-weave quilt that is all layered and ready to be quilted. I started to quilt it by hand, but at the moment, I'm not pleased with how it looks. I will most likely undo the hand stitching I've already done and start over.
2. A barghello-type quilt to which I'd like to add a border, but haven't done any more than think about that. I'm not sure what color I want to use for it.
3. The Dresden Plate. I'm ready to add the border. I thought I would get it done last weekend, but as I was preparing to press my freshly washed border fabric, I realized it was about two shades too light. No good. Had to go get more fabric. This time I actually took a piece of the original along to compare. Lesson learned.

Okay, those are only the ones I mentioned in my first entry. However, I've been drawing in my graph paper notebook for several months and I have all these design ideas: 

1. I'm going to make a fan quilt. I have all the fan pieces cut out, but some need to be shaped to either have a point or a curved edge. It's going to be a time consuming project, so I started another one which I thought might go faster.
2. The batik quilt. At first, when I just saw the batik fabrics in the store or online, I wasn't sure I'd like them. After seeing how some quilters have used these fabrics, I was eager to make one, myself. I found a block style that was used as a border for a quilt in a magazine and I thought that might be a cool all-over block done in batiks. I only have to do some minor cutting to get rather large blocks, right? WRONG! It was nearly as time consuming, but I think that's mostly because I'm working with fat quarters instead of full width fabric. I do have the batiks coordinated in the color combinations I want, but the cutting is a little more piddly than I was expecting. Oh, well.
3. Mom's Music quilt. This is one I've designed for my mom. She really likes the look of quilts made with bright colors against black and I found to black music fabric (she's a piano teacher) with rainbow colored musical notes on it. That became the inspiration for the rest of the quilt design. I drew it out in my graph notebook and then, with my American Quilt Society fabric calculator, I was able to figure out how much more fabric I'd need to complete the design I came up with. I have all the fabric for this quilt and it's washed. I just need to press, quilt, sew. 
4. The Tennenbaum quilt. A couple of years ago I saw a Christmas tree quilt on display at one of the fabric shops I like to haunt. It was very simple and figured I could do something like it, so I came home and started designing and drawing and erasing and redrawing and coloring, etc. Some of my designs were soooooper elaborate, so I chucked them. Why torture myself? In the meantime, I picked up the fabrics for it. I have a box of holiday fabrics in my sewing room that were all devoted to that one project. Now, I've weeded out the ones I really want for it and will then have to figure out how much of each I'll actually use. Being February, this project, while it's the one I've been thinking about for the longest and spent to most time designing, will be the last one I tackle.

So my goal is not to have all of these quilted and complete in a matter of months or whatever, because, for me, that's just not realistic. I've decided to finish the Dresden, barghello, fan, batik and music quilt tops by the time school's out in June. Then I'll have the summer to teach myself how to actually quilt the darn things. I have a bit of an assembly line thing going. Then, once I have those done, I'll tackle The Tree.

It's very important for me to pace myself. I want to just tear into things, but I also have fibromyalgia and in a couple of weeks, I'm going to start home-schooling my 3rd grader. (I'm sure that somehow I can work all this quilting geometry into a math assignment. There must be a way!) I'm also commissioned to write a play (first reading next month!) and my husband and I'll be traveling to Cancun in April. 

And I'm doing this by myself, why? Oh, yeah. Because, clearly, I'm nuts.

popping the proverbial cherry.

Okay, here's my first blog about quilting. I really wasn't sure I'd do this, but, hey! Whadya know? Here I am. I do have several interests, and I'll definitely be bringing those into this blog. I'm inspired by a lot of things and I like to keep people on their toes. You have been warned.
I really never thought much about quilting. Not myself, anyway. I've admired quilts and my grandma made very simple scrap quilts that were quilted by means of tying, rather than sewing.
I have yet to actually quilt anything, but I have completed one "top" and I have two that are in the works. The completed top is a basketweave pattern and the two unfinished ones are a Dresden Plate, which is what I'm currently focusing on and a, well, it isn't exactly a barghello (okay, I may not have spelled that correctly), but that's sort of the technique I used to do it.
Don't worry if you have no idea what I'm talking about. I'm a total beginner, so my goal in this blog is to make it fun for both the beginner and the more experienced quilter (from whom I'll be happy to learn!).
Soon I'll post photos of the ones I'm working on and let's see where this puppy goes!