Bias nightmares

Here is the EQ representation of a quilt I am making. I mentioned it before Christmas, I think. It came from a Marsha McCloskey book "Quick Classic Quilts". Classic I will give her, but quick? I think not. I am quite frankly in bias hell. And with all those triangles to join, I find myself marking the intersections at each and every corner. Oh, it's not pretty, people.

And there's no love around here for this little beauty. My husband pronounced it "another brown quilt". Au contraire, my dear, it is tan with a rose trumpet vine design, and 30 different rose colored Ohio star blocks. Brown it ain't. And I think it's cute as a button. Stand by for more later.

On another front, I delivered my second (see, I told you I was crazy) Quiltville Carolina Christmas mystery quilt to the longarm quilter last Wednesday. This one was arranged per Bonnie Hunter's original plan, and frankly copied from the color choices of one Ms. Caroline Van Maele of Belgium, who posted such luscious pictures I had to make one. The first was bed size (gigantic bed size) but this is a smaller version. I was going to make a half-scale version but the small blocks looked too busy and overwhelmed the design. So, I just made fewer blocks in the original size, which is frankly small enough.
It's being panto quilted with snowflakes, and will be called "Christmas in America". (I'm really getting into this quilt naming thing!)

What else is going on? Well, I made a small mystery quilt (59" x 59") from Quiltbug's site for Superbowl Sunday and I won a $25 gift certificate for being one of the first to finish. The generous site owner gave directions for a 42" square and a 59" square design, and awarded a gift certificate to two people, the first ones who sent her a photo of a finished quilt for each size. Yay me!

I probably should have used a more interesting background than the Moda Marbles ivory, but that's part of the danger of mystery quilts - by the time you realize you should have made other fabric choices, it's usually too late. But it will make a great larger quilt for Project Linus.

ADDENDUM: In case you are wondering why the quilt is hanging so funny in the picture, I thumbtacked it to the tops of the closet door facings to take a picture at midnight on Sunday. I had just finished it and was trying to get the photo quickly, and no way was I going to get out the tension rods I put on the closet jambs to hang up this quilt! And it's wider than the one closet door so it extends across the wall onto the other closet's door frame. That's what the weird wrinkle on the bottom right is; I can confirm the quilt is square. And I don't know if it's visible in the picture, but I put a "peeper" in the borders between the green and rust, and I swear to you I'm never doing one of those again! All that trouble and you can't even see it!

Well, back to the triangles. . .

Every fabric finds its use

See that tan and red print at the top of the picture? It's from Moda's 2000 collection "Trumpet Vine". I bought it then for the backing of a quilt, but decided not to use it. There are at least 5 yards of this beautiful print, and I could never cut into it because I never had a project I felt worthy of it. This is weird because I'm not a red quilt person, and generally don't even buy much red. I do, however use rose and pink often, and have a large stash of small remainders of those colors, as well as some Thimbleberries reds left over from the pieced flower, birdhouse and village quilts.

In the last few days when I was searching for the Storm At Sea pattern, I reacquainted myself with a lot of my quilt books. Interestingly, however, the pattern I found that captured my imagination was in the same McCloskey book as the SAS.

This is it:
I think this simple Ohio Star pattern is so striking and so effective, it will be worthy of my hoarded Moda print. I'll use it for the background, and use the 30 red/rose/pink selections in the star blocks - each one different. The whites in the picture will be the star backgrounds. The sawtooth border will be made of the various reds and pinks.

I wanted to get a real variety of reds and pinks in this quilt. If you look at the large flowers in the Moda piece, you will find many, many shades of red, rose, pink, and even a little coral. So I gulped, stepped outside my comfort zone, and started pulling scraps. There's exact matches, there's sorta-matches, there's lighter than, there's darker than, and there's pieces that shade into the range and coordinate. There's also monotone prints, two color prints, and three color prints. Enough to make the eye dance all over the quilt. I think if you're going to go scrappy, really go for it.

I'm also going to reduce the pattern size. The book gives measurements for an 81" x 100" queen size quilt with 9" Ohio star blocks. I wanted to make a smaller quilt, but not reduce the number of blocks or its complexity, so I downsized everything by 1/3. The quilt will now be 56" x 78" or thereabouts, and the blocks 6".

One thing I liked about the layout was it was a zigzag set, not an alternating block set. That meant that I had to recalculate the setting triangles (there's three sizes) and also resize the sawtooth border. It's my feeling that this quilt will be more interesting on a smaller scale.

I keep coming up with new ideas that line-jump my project list, and this had to be one of them. I'll start it after the Quiltville mystery which begins Friday. Then, "Kentucky Girl Moves to Tennessee" (the blue and gold one) will be after "Ohio Through Rose Colored Glasses" (my name for the new one!). Alas, I won't have much time to work on the mystery or anything else through the end of the month, since I have a doctor's appointment on Monday to have my stitches removed and then find a new cell phone, Christmas shopping and wrapping on next Tuesday so I can take presents home when I visit later in the week, and a dentist appointment next Thursday (the one that means a 150 mile round trip back to my former town). Then I leave town a week from Friday for 4 days. In between all that, I have to get a little time to sew!

Maybe I can take the sewing machine home. Mom goes to bed really early.