It's not just a hobby.......

.....it's an exercise program. This afternoon, I'm gathering my tools to cut out a quilt. The kitchen, where I cut out, sew and press, is at the east end of the house. The third bedroom, where fabric and tools are stored, is at the west end of the house. The house is 80 feet long. Wonder how many miles I have logged going back and forth since I moved here!


Also, I splurged this morning on a rolling case for my Juki sewing machine. The case was on sale at Hancock's for 40% off, making it what I considered a reasonable price. This machine doesn't have a hard case, just a soft cover, and I hated to try to take it somewhere because it was unprotected, and pretty heavy too. There were several tapestry patterns, but I just had to pick the one with ladybugs.

I was at Hancock's looking for a fabric printed with old radios, that Jacquie used in a mini quilt. She was kind enough to answer my question about where she found it. It came from her local Hancock Fabrics store, but unfortunately, it looks like Hancock's here never had it. I'm disappointed because one of my husband's hobbies is restoring old radios and I have tried to find radio fabric for a long time. If anyone ever sees quilting cottons printed with antique or old radios, please let me know.

Oh, yes. An update on the Laurel Burch kitty print quilt. I completed the top and pieced a backing - using the orange and green fabrics I couldn't seem to use on the front! With the print on the back, they work fine. No use letting some good fat quarters go to waste.

That means I have four small tops waiting to be quilted. And I'm cutting out a new one anyway!

Listening to the fabric

I'm making a Project Linus quilt using a large print from the "Fanciful Felines" line by Laurel Burch. It has bright orange, green, blue, pink, purple and yellow in the design. When I bought the yardage, I picked out fat quarters of predominately green, orange and purple, as well as a few fat quarters of purple and hot pink batiks that I got for free when I filled my punch card at Lavender Lime quilt shop. In the shop, they looked fine - bright, interesting and compatible.

When I started cutting out the quilt at home I held every piece of fabric up to the print, and except for purple and pink they all shouted "NO, NO, NO!" The purple and pink cozied up to the print and purred "Oh, yes, just imagine us as a cute little girl's quilt."

"But I didn't want to make a gender specific quilt this time. This bright fabric will be OK for any little kid."

"Nope," the focus fabric replied coyly. "This is a little girl's quilt, and you can't make me be anything else."

Chastened, I used the purples and the hot pinks in the blocks. Then came time to pick sashing. Again, I tried the greens.

'You're not listening," the fabric protested. "I said pink." And it wouldn't be argued with.

So to the stash closet I went and pulled out a few softer pinks. And, just like the three bears, one of them was JUST right. So I'm not making the quilt I envisioned at all.

The moral of this story is that sometimes even the best planned color schemes fall apart, and we need to be open to see other possibilities. We stack the bolts up in the quilt shop and squint at the colors, trying to imagine them blended together in blocks. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't. I figure that it's hard to hear the fabric talking to you in that visually busy environment. At home, lay it all out and let the color story it tells best come to you. Trust your gut feelings, and be open to change.

If you're a controlling sort of personality, this is hard. But I know every one of you has completed a quilt top that was 90% there design-wise, and just couldn't figure out where that last 10% went. Something just wasn't right. Often you try to convince yourself it is OK as it is. Sometimes you start ripping out seams and doing a little cosmetic surgery.

Projects that fall a little short of the mark are learning experiences, I tell myself every time. It's true. But while I'm wielding the seam ripper, that seems a dear price to pay!

Flower bed

Remember this?Well, now it looks like this:I'm the furthest thing from a gardener, but I managed to get this little patch going. I love this flower bed. It's a bright cheery spot of color in the back yard that I can see from my den, and it has my favorite flower color combination - yellow and purple. The birds love it too.

See the flower pots on either side? Tomatoes and bell peppers. And look what I found this morning:'Maters! I'll be making fresh pasta sauce in July.

And, because I have waxed poetic about flowers in this post:Torenia - isn't it grand? Ah, summer is near!

Inappropriate comments

I had to delete a new comment on an older post about local quilt shops. Someone, I'm assuming the owner of the store, left an anonymous comment that was a mini-commercial for their local business. If it had not been anonymous or if it had been phrased differently, as in "Hi, I have a new quilt store in the area. Please visit my business and tell me what you think", I would have reacted differently, but the way the comment was done hit me the wrong way. I'm not here to give you free publicity unless I am commenting about my dealings with you. I'm happy to use your name when I have good things to pass on and want local people to check out your store. But, to be fair, I don't think I've ever criticized a person or a business by name when I was unhappy with their actions; the other party wouldn't be able to give their side of the story. (OK, you might catch me out on that comment if you checked all my posts, but I try not to do that. I've written a lot of words in this blog and don't remember all of them.)

I don't do comment screening and I don't block anonymous comments because I like to read a variety of opinions and until now have not had any bad experiences with advertising, sleaze or spam-like comments. Anonymous comments are ok because I understand some people want to limit their web presence - I was that way for a long time. But I know bloggers that have had to invoke comment moderation to protect themselves and their web persona.

In short -- in my opinion, that advertisement masquerading as a comment was tacky.

Rethinking block construction

I just made a comment on Paula's blog about block construction and thought I'd expand on it here. While sewing the May block for Block Central's BOM "Somewhere in Time" I realized that there was an easier way to construct the block than the instructions specified. I have to admit that I almost never read pattern instructions unless it's a really complicated piece, and also almost never buy a pattern (I draft them myself from the picture - what a great side effect of my engineering background!)

Anyway, since I'm making this BOM in two sizes and two colors, by the time the first block is finished I have studied the design and sometimes make improvements on the construction of the second. Here is the first block I made, by their instructions (please ignore the creases, the blocks were folded up in storage):

Concentrate on the middle inside the green sashing. Note that it's built around the center blue square. The rust triangles are added, then the beige triangles, and then strips are added to the four sides consisting of half square triangles, squares and flying geese. I looked at it and decided that it's really a fancy nine patch block. So I broke up the design differently and made the second blocks this way:

Now it's just an augmented nine patch, consisting of one solid square, four double flying geese squares, and four half square triangles with an additional square inset in the corner. The same look, but it was much faster to put together and you stitch fewer bias edges.

I'm curious if others do the same thing: rethink the construction to simplify your sewing. Comments? Let me know, please.

While we're talking about pattern instructions, let me air a pet peeve. I just ran into this particular one on my Christmas BOM. I hate, hate, hate it when they tell you to cut certain size pieces to sew together, and then instruct you to square up the resulting patch to a specified size! In this case, the directions said to cut out two squares, sew through the diagonal twice and cut apart to make two HSTs, and then to trim them to a 3 1/2" square. What a waste of time. Why not just tell just us to cut the pieces the correct size to begin with? We can sew an accurate 1/4" seam. Stuff like this is why I don't read instructions and I make my own patterns.

Borders

I am starting to put the borders on my butterfly quilt. Getting to this point means a) you're about finished and b) a whole other set of possible problems just opened up. There's the design selection thing (plain? pieced? narrow? wide?); the corner construction thing (lapped? mitered?); the edge and corner finish thing (squared? rounded? scalloped?); and of course the accuracy thing (i.e., please don't let me distort this quilt top out of recognition as a parallel-sided geometric form!).

I like striped borders and usually use the stripes crosswise. That means stretchy borders and mitered corners, two possible areas fraught with difficulties. Once I get the striped mitered border attached, I usually use lapped corners on the outer border, if there is one. I know that if you have several borders, it may be faster to sew them together and apply as one mitered piece but the lapped corners seem to add stability to the quilt shape.

I also like to cut the borders length of grain if possible to add more stability, but if I get cheap I'll just cut them cross-grain to save fabric. I like the look of a fairly wide border in the focus fabric (from 3/4 of a block to a full block wide), to tie all the colors of the pieced top together. This works better on larger quilts.

But best of all, adding the first border strips lets you get a glimpse of the finished design and gives you a final chance to make design changes. I, however, once famously did not pay attention at this point and had to hang the finished top up for photography before it hit me that the border was wrong, wrong, wrong.

The picture is just a teaser: you'll see the completed quilt top later. Two more border segments and my butterfly nap quilt top will be completed, and I wouldn't change a thing. But -- I'm piecing the backing, so I am far from done!

What your car color says about your personality?

Every so often Yahoo news comes up with the oddest articles. The latest to catch my eye was "What your car color reveals about your psyche". Oh, come on.

I don't know about you, but the color is often very low on my list of priorities when buying a new or used car. I'm far more worried about how dependable a vehicle it is, whether it has been wrecked, whether it has the features I need, how good is its gas mileage. Color doesn't even make the top four. Anyway, we've bought our share of used cars, where finding a specific color is highly improbable.

My car right now is a red Subaru. According to the article, you should be scared -- very, very scared. Aggressive, moody, high-speed driver with low self-esteem and confidence, that's what the color supposedly says. I was going for cheery, fun, upbeat and visible, but what do I know? I'm not a psychologist. Also, my very first car was a red VW beetle (my dad's pick, not mine), and I had not owned a red car since I was seventeen. I bought this one when I was turning 50. It seemed like a suitable gesture -- I joked that when a boring person has a mid-life crisis, they buy a red station wagon!

Anyway, if this color stuff has any credibility, a review of my car colors starts to look like multiple personality disorder -- red, blue, yellow, gray, blue, green, red. My husband's choices? White, white, maroon, white, green. (Hey, maybe he is more stable than me! LOL) I think it just says that I drove more on average to work than he did and wore out cars quicker, and that we bought what was on the dealers' lots. That was definitely the case with the yellow El Camino and the gray Sentra, although I did like the yellow El Camino because I like yellow. (The gray Sentra -- not so much. The color choices were dark gray and dirt brown. Ugh.)

My husband also buys bigger cars than I do and they seem to come in more sedate colors than my compact cars. My green Mazda was definitely a more exuberant green than his Q45, which is so dark it's almost black.

Anyway, most people buy what's available, and that's usually a pretty limited choice. The dealer isn't going to fill his lot full of red or bright yellow cars; he'll buy white, black, gray and other subtle colors likely to appeal to the most people. It also depends on the colors in vogue at the time. The powder blue VW and the yellow El Camino were from the 70's. The maroon and gray cars we bought in the late 80's, when those colors were fashionable. The blue and green Mazdas were from the 90's.

If you need a better predictor of driving style and personality, go with the vehicle model criterion. Personally, if I see a Hummer appear in my rear view mirror, I wince. Maybe it's only a local phenomenon, but my experience with Hummer drivers is that they are the most arrogant, pushy people on the road. And if the driver of a vehicle so big that my roof cargo rack is even with his door handles wants to drive aggressively -- well, I get out of his way and give him the road. Which is what he wanted, all along.