Drowning in a storm at sea

There's no reason to ask if you've done this. If you have any UFOs, it's likely this problem has happened to you.

I have a scrappy Storm At Sea that I started an embarrassingly long time ago. I've been in this "finish what you started" mood for a while, and I'm almost done with stockpiled binding jobs. I only have a few small tops awaiting quilting (I hope to do these myself if Santa got me those machine quilting DVDs I asked for). In fact, I'm pretty much caught up and ready for the mystery quilt that starts Friday. That is, except for the UFOs stockpiled on the top shelf of my stash closet. There's about 10 of them. Some of them are UFOs because I bought a kit and never got around to finishing it. Some are half-done and I got bored, bored, bored. Others were too nerve-frazzling for the time I was making them. This Storm At Sea was such a quilt.

I figure it's been marinating up there for about 10 years. Maybe more.

I pulled out all the bagged bunches of fabric. There were the pieces for the 8" square-in-a-square-inside-a-square blocks, the pieces for the diamond sashing, and the 4" square-in-a-square sashing corner blocks. But there were also some 8" square-in-a-square blocks, and some diamond sashing and 4"square-in-a-square corner blocks with the light/dark colors reversed. Wha????

I have no idea how this quilt is assembled.

OK. I knew it was a pattern from a book. Now, which book? Even though I cleaned out my shelves last year, I still have quite a few quilting books. So I pulled up a chair and started thumbing through them. It took a while, but finally I pulled out Marsha McCloskey's wonderful "Quick Classic Quilts" and there it was.

A Storm At Sea quilt with a reversed-colors pieced border. Page 114. It's on the chest at the foot of the bed in this cover picture.

What size is it? 94" x 94".

I guess I know why I burned out on it before. I'll start with the center, and if everything goes well, I'll add the pieced border. Or maybe not.

Stitches update

The stitches in my back are going from ouch-y to itchy. I bet a lot of you know what I mean. Don't you just hate that? Luckily they're in a very inaccessible place over my right shoulder blade.

Nothing quilt-y to report, since I'm still doing bindings. I'm......so......bored. ZZZZZZ..........

I'm in stitches

I had a cyst removed from my back yesterday. I have stitches. Ouch.

I went through this a few years ago with a pre-malignant cyst on my arm (we didn't know how about the pre-malignant stuff until the path report came back). How did I forget how sore these incisions get?

EQ6 is deeply cool!

The above image was created from EQ6 using imported images of fabrics from the webstore Thousands of Bolts. (This, by the way, is one of my favorite places to shop on the web. Just be sure you have plenty of time to browse - their stock is LARGE. And discounted!)

I originally drew this using sketchbook fabrics in EQ6 similar to those I posted Wednesday. After I assembled that pile of fabrics I was trying to decide whether to use them on this project or on the new Quiltville mystery. I was aiming for "not brown" to please my husband. This pattern, by the way, is taken from a Connecting Threads kit. It has a traditional name but I can't remember it, although I've seen it before. I made a navy/wine/brown/neutral version about which my husband said he liked the blocks but not the colors. So, I sketched it using blue/navy/gold/orange. That got the thumbs up.

I browsed Thousands of Bolts this morning while waiting to leave for a doctor's appointment. They had some lovely batiks with dark and light blue backgrounds, an orange monotone batik, and a gold with blue and rust flecks. So, I decided to splurge (if $4.50 a yard for batiks is considered a splurge) and ordered the fabric to make a quilt for my husband.

Here's where the EQ6 coolness comes in: I copied the fabric samples from the web store and imported them into my sketchbook in EQ, so I could color my layout with exactly the fabrics I will use. I have a few quibbles: the light and dark blue pieces have more visible yellow and orange swirls in the batik and aren't as gray as the imported images look, but generally it's pretty accurate. Know before you sew - I love it!

You all probably already knew about this, but I hadn't tried it yet, so allow me my moment of Yippee!

By the way, as I looked at this quilt with light and dark blue, gold and orange, I decided to name it "Kentucky Girl Moves to Tennessee". Blue for University of Kentucky colors, Orange for University of Tennessee, and blue and gold for University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.

Dreaming up a color scheme

See that piece of pale blue/green in the bottom left corner? I woke up this morning at 6 a.m. thinking about it. I used a bit of it in my version of "In Lucinda's Garden". You know you're completely controlled by your fabric stash when it wakes you up in the morning. Anyway, I love the color in this fabric and would like to make something else with it.

I got up and pulled it out of the "blue" box in my stash. Then I started looking to see what else wanted to come along. The gold bits on some of these pieces sent me to that box and there I found batiks with the same blue in the pattern. The, of course, I had to find coordinating neutrals.

The stack was lovely but needed a "kick". I thought about rust, but I'm out of it. Then I found a 2 yard piece of that beautiful orange-y coral. I don't even remember why I have it; I seldom use any shade of red or orange. Since blue and orange are complementary colors, a small amount of this accent could really add life to the resulting color scheme.

I guess I still had Bonnie Hunter's new mystery quilt on my mind, because I gravitated toward a color/color/neutral/accent arrangement. So now that I have pulled these fabrics, what should I do with them? Does anyone have a quilt pattern in mind?

ADDENDUM: Oh good grief! Look at the colors in my new background which I recently added. I think this was a subliminal suggestion!

ADDENDUM 2: And, we got a Thanksgiving card yesterday, with golden and rusty leaves on a blue/green background. Another subliminal suggestion. It's nice to know that some part of my brain works on these things without supervision.

I got bored with sewing bindings so...

...I made this for my cat.
Molly the changeable has taken to sleeping on a chair in the living room. She is now completely shunning her "kitty cube" that she loved so much just a few months ago. And, after over seven years she made up her mind that she can sleep on furniture other than the bed. So she snuggles up in a corner of the living room chair near the hall door so she can keep an eye on the comings and goings.

The problem is, she sheds. And the chairs are upholstered in a cream/blue/taupe stripe from Kravet that isn't made anymore, so I am really careful not to stain/damage them. So, I pulled out a small pink and green Lover's Knot quilt I made for my last cat back when the living room was a different color and scrunched it into a little kitty nest for her on the chair seat.

Molly loves it. I can't express how shocked I was because usually if we suggest anything she immediately hates it. So, I decided on the spur of the moment to make a quilt to use there which will coordinate a little better with the living room.

These are all scraps of fabrics from Connecting Threads left over from other projects. The border design arose because I didn't have enough navy fabric. I would have liked the darker taupe inset strip to continue straight across the corner of the quilt but the navy strips weren't long enough so it came out asymmetrical. Oh well.

I had to piece the backing too. There was a length of a cream print that wasn't quite wide enough so I added a strip of rectangles in blue/taupe/cream/navy. Those inserted strips are a good place to sew on the label. Oh yes, the binding had to be pieced from two slightly different shades of taupe. It felt good to be able to use up all these related scraps, but it was a stretch trying to finish without running out!

Now the trick will be getting it quilted and ready to use before she decides that chairs are yucky and she doesn't want to sleep there anymore. It could happen.

ADDENDUM: I just looked in the living room and she's sleeping in the other chair. Rats.

Hand sewing day

I've got the second Christmas present quilt rolled up on my desk to expose the binding I'm sewing right now (third side - I've been at it for hours) and have music playing on my computer (The Wailing Jennys now, Vienna Teng later). My desk is a great place to do hand sewing. There's a nice bright light on an articulated arm so I can see, and a padded desk chair, and when I want to take a break I can look out the sliding door at the golden leaves on my neighbor's sweet gum tree. The wind is rhythmically moving its branches and the leaves occasionally detach and flutter down.

A nice quiet day for completing some of my binding work. As long as I have good music or interesting radio to listen to, I can stay here for hours. But maybe I need to get a pillow for my lower back first...