Nana’s Monochromatic Placemat

A while ago I made a placemat for may grandmother. Unfortunately, I don’t have a picture of it, but it was white with a blue scrappy border, because blue is her favorite color. Last Friday, she told me again how much she really loved it, and little is more satisfying as that for me! I asked what color she’d like if I made another, and she said “beige & tan”, which…to me is basically the same color, and not a very nice one at that! So…

I added in some deeper values (otherwise known as “brown”), along with varying scales of prints, and solids. 

I did it Quilt-As-You-Go, which was super quick. I’d sew a strip to the batting, flip & press, and sew another. When I was done, I quilted through the backing in a few places, and sewed on some perfect leftover binding. 

Wonky Log Cabins, Part 2

I made my goal of 16 blocks, and they really did use scraps nicely. For the last “round”, I used my neutral scraps, because I also had a lot of those. 

However, I think next time I would:

• Use thinner strings, with more “rounds” per log cabin
• Edit out the blues that worked more like low-volume prints, because they ended making it hard to tell in some cases that they even are log cabins
• Try a technique I read about on a now-defunct blog, where you cut all your scraps an equal width and then sew them all together end-to-end to make a really really long string, then cut as needed for your log cabin. That could eat up more scraps. 

I’ve started sewing them into rows, using my own method of not having to be precise about block size, but really being more laborious in the end and having to figure out which blocks match up best. 

Excuse the wrinkles; I had them rolled up in an ill-fated attempt to….avoid wrinkles.

I’m not super loving it, so I’m letting it rest for a little while. Sometimes the answer comes to me as I fall asleep, and sometimes space and time are the beat things for a piece. We’ll see.

Cupid’s Arrow table runner

Happy almost-Valentine’s Day! In our family, the holiday is a week early, commemorating the first time my husband came to visit me after we met online, all those years ago.

So I trawled through my pink & red scrap bin to make a random herringbone table runner, with splashes of white. Quilted with my new walking foot, in lines that match the pattern.

It came together pretty quickly, which was satisfying after a months-long full-size quilt! And more walking foot practice.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

January Art Journaling

Some pages from last month:

Inspired by a recent post by Alisa Burke

Finished (and slightly damaged from a water spill) since this progress shot: 

Inspired by the art of Connie over at Dirty Footprints Studio:

Painting in Multiples

One night as I was falling asleep, a painting idea came to me, with a specific process. I couldn’t get my paints out for another couple days, but I painted it in my head several times. And when I did get some studio time, I painted it on several media.

First, my art journal:

Then some cardboard:

Detail of square-in-squares:

And then a giant canvas I stretched myself, about 18×24. It’s a saggy first timer, and the scrap wood has some weird indents, but I’m learning.

This one is still in process, and you can see that the middle leaf-shaped thing is “supposed” to start with purple-on-purple circles before the square-on-squares. 

Not sure where any of this is “going”, or went, but an interesting exercise nonetheless!

Sam’s Quilt!

Well, the first quilt finish of 2017 is here. Here are previous incarnations, back when I was going with a 6×6 layout. Because I wanted a rectangle bedspread, I changed it to 5×7, which came out to about 56×79″. Just big enough for the top of a full size bed with not much hanging on the side, because Sam is 2 and we have bedrails on his bed. 

Quilted with my new walking foot, which was not as easy as I had hoped, due to it being the largest I’ve ever worked. Wrangle is the word that kept coming to mind. 

But I embraced my motto of “Perfect is the enemy of done”, and carried on. It may have contributed to my back injury, though, and I had to take a couple weeks off from working on it. During which, this happened:

My most beloved & elderly cat, Bean, commandeered it for his new Napping Spot. And I swear, he did something, because when my back felt better and I resumed work, it went much more smoothly. Thank you, Bean!