quilty by disassociation: Quilty as Charged...

quilty by disassociation: Quilty as Charged...: Busy month! Had a table read for a play I wrote (went very well), opened Crimes of the Heart at the Bloomington Civic Theatre on the 18th (A...

Quilty as Charged...

Busy month! Had a table read for a play I wrote (went very well), opened Crimes of the Heart at the Bloomington Civic Theatre on the 18th (Also doing very well, I'm playing Lenny) and last week, through a miserable cold, I went to 6 auditions (and was cast in one of them). Also got my eldest son set up for his IEP at school and found him an amazing therapist. Then our washing machine broke. Tomorrow the new one arrives. I had a load of fabric pre-washing when it went down, so I don't have the backing ready for Lillian's quilt. Needless to say, I didn't get a whole lot done in the quilt department. Quilty as charged.
On the other hand, over the last weekend, I put together the top of the pink quilt and made 26 multi-colored blocks for my niece's baby. I then made a bed runner from the pink/black/grey scraps, organized the other scraps by size and color, cleaned the bathroom, helped my husband replace the mini-split (heating and a/c) units in the boys' rooms, cleaned my eldest son's room and found him a new desk, a table that was made from an old treadle sewing machine stand. It's got a built in fidgit! (He's on the autism spectrum and has a hard time sitting still) I (finally) cleared the gutters, baked meringue cookies for my friend's Memorial day cook-out and designed two full fabric collections for my Spoonflower account. Not bad for someone who "doesn't work" LOL. I guess I really shouldn't beat myself up about not getting on to blog. I still have to take photos of the stuff I did get done, but they are on their way.
For next month, I have to plan my younger son's 6th birthday (Transformer cake - check!) and figure out something special for Father's Day and our 10th Anniversary. And go to two graduation parties. And attend a workshop on how to audition for musical theatre. And have two more weekends of performances. And... <insert exploding head here>

...then I'll have 6 weeks with no shows. Maybe I'll get something done then?

Bad blog! Naughty blog!

I'm probably the worst blogger. I have a hard time sticking to things. However, in my defense, I have been rather busy.
My husband and I took a vacation to Cancun, where I finished my certification for SCUBA diving. Not surprisingly, I found a lot of inspiration while I was under water! The colors, shapes, animals, patterns... all lend themselves to the creative mind.
Before I left for the trip, I prepped several hexagons to take along to work on by hand. It's going to be a long process, since I will probably only work on that while I'm traveling anywhere. However, I have quite a few "flowers" for Grandma's Flower Garden made, so it's a decent start.
My mom took the Dresden top down to her place for storage until I'm ready to put a backing on it. The batik top is draped over the stair rail in my living room. It looks pretty nice, so I'm going to let it live there for a while.
My friends, Laurel and Nathan, had their baby girl and today I finished laying out the squares for the blanket I'm going to make for them. It's several shades of pink, white, gray and black. I read that babies' eyes find the sharp contrasts first, and though it might get to Lillian after her eyes have adjusted, that was my original plan when choosing the colors. It's very simple. I had a 9 inch square of pink gingham from the curtains my mom made for my bedroom when I was around three, so it's 20 - 9 inch squares. I may or may not put a border on it depending on time and money and how it looks when it's done.
I also found out that my niece is going to have a baby in November and I saw a quilt in a magazine that I thought would make a great blanket for her baby. It's squares within squares, again with the contrasting color idea. For mine, I'm going to use a whole bunch of colors and prints (mostly geometric shapes, but some others as well). When I was a kid, my Grandma Louise made scrap quilts and I was always fascinated by all the different colors and patterns. One of those quilts was used when my niece was a baby for her (and her siblings) to play on. We'd ask, "Find blue." or, "Find a flower." It became a game about learning colors and pictures. I'm going to make it unisex and not too baby-ish, since we don't know what she's having and then it's easier to pass along to the next child. I'm going to use a modified log cabin to make the squares. I have quite a few of the strips cut already, but I discovered I hadn't got any yellow for it. The yellows are in the washing machine as I type. I think I'm going to sash the blocks, but, to be honest, I haven't made up my mind as yet.
I have started work on the Fan Dancer quilt, but I've set it aside for now while I work on these other things.
On top of all of that, I've begun rehearsals for the play, Crimes of the Heart. We're into our fourth week of rehearsals. I also sang in a concert piece written by a friend of mine. It was fantabulous! However, as you can see, I've been quite busy, so I hope you'll forgive the lack of blogs.

okay, as promised, pix of the latest top. Sorry it isn't quite as clear as it looked on my phone. ={
The red and white quilt above isn't mine, but it's the one that inspired mine. I had been looking for a block to work with some batiks I had collected. Yeah it's sideways, but you get the, erm, picture.

Here's the layout of mine. I think I'll call it "Cacophony of Cups". Or Stanley. I haven't yet made up my mind. Yeah. It's pretty busy. It took a great deal of time and effort to lay out the block in such a way as to not have the same colors immediately next to one another, to develop some sort of rhythm and flow. I wanted to make sure that, since there are so many colors and patterns, that the eye feels comfortable moving from one place to another, that no one place is to dark or too light. That was quite a challenge. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to do one quite like this again. I really hated sewing in those angles. Well, hate's a strong word. Yeah, I'll stick with "challenge", on both a skill level (for me) and sanity level.
I worried a lot about this one. The Dresden was easy by comparison.

finally!

I started homeschooling my son on the 22nd and hadn't been able to get back to the batik top until last night! Anyway, I finished the top. Now I'm trying to figure out how to get the pix from my phone to the computer without first posting them to facebook. I don't know that all my fb friends are terribly interested in seeing them. On the other hand, I guess it couldn't hurt. I let them know about all the other stuff I'm up to.
I did have some trouble with it. I'm not sure if I simply wasn't keeping my seam allowances even or if my cutting was farkucht, but I managed to finagle my way into a complete quilt top. I also took some of the left over strips and sewed them together so I can make a carrier to go with the quilt.
As I was laying out my blocks, however, I kept thinking to myself, "What were you thinking? All these colors? The different batik patterns. Are you high? Should you be in order to appreciate this one?" I know that my favorite colors aren't everyone's cup of chai. I know not everyone will appreciate the cacophony of colors I put together. Do I like it? Yeah. I think I do. It's growing on me. And not in a fungal kind of way. My five year old son asked if he could have it. To be honest, I'm hoping someone will like it enough to purchase it. Especially since I'm going to make the carrier and beach/picnic season is coming up.
I guess, as far as the pix go, I'll just have to suck it up and post them in the round about way through fb, but that's not altogether a bad thing. Maybe my friends will follow them over here? I hope so!

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.