Not what I should have been doing

Monday is my biggest sewing day here, and this Monday was no exception. What I *should* have done was baste Tommy's quilt, but we were all recovering from a stomach virus that hit our house last week - well, they were recovering from a virus. I was recovering from three days of laundry and just didn't want to crawl around on the floor basting a quilt. I wanted to sit upright and do something less taxing.

What I did instead was make some great progress on my neglected Salt Air Hopscotch blocks. I wouldn't describe this as quick and easy - not if you want those points to line up - but I'm just loving this pattern:

I am having better luck with my seams lining up - that would be an absolute kill joy to me if I kept having all the problems I was having with the first set.

Don't you just love the colors in Salt Air?

I'm linking up to Freshly Pieced for her WIP Wednesday. That's usually worth an hour every Wednesday, seeing what everyone is creating this week.

Preparing for Tommy

You know Athena has a brother, right? His name is Tommy. He and his dad will be joining us after the school year ends.

My original plan for his quilt was to copy some zig zags that my friend Mandy made for her boys. I'm not sure why she never posted these on her blog, because they are awesome quilts. In looking for my notes on how to make hers, I ran across a pattern I had been playing with last year and decided to go with it instead. When I was working with it then, I all but abandoned the idea as I couldn't quite figure out how to make it work. Whether it was taking my eyes off it for a while, or an extra year of experience, it clicked with me almost as soon as I opened it.

So, it's with a little bit of apprehension, and a whole lot of excitement, that I present my first original quilt design:

And I did it with no partial seams. It's curious to me that I've only made 3 quilts completely out of solids, and all three have been for this one family. Odd, huh?

Meighan and Athena are settling in nicely. Meighan had a heck of a week her first week - she had to buy a car, get insurance, find a pre-school, buy some new work clothes, get her drivers license, and take the drug test for her new job. Doesn't that just make you tired to think about?

I'll be linking this up to Crazy Mom Quilts for her Finish it Friday series.

In the nick of time

Still warm from the dryer, here's the finished quilt for Athena:

Do you remember my proclamation last fall, the one where I swore I would never quilt a quilt in concentric squares again? My exact words were: "I will not squeeze, push, pull, tug a quilt of any size thru the throat of my machine 2 complete turn per square EVER AGAIN." Well, I did squeeze, push, pull, and tug plenty on this, but it was circles rather than squares. Not sure why I thought that would make a difference. 

I tried repeatedly to come up with any other design, but those flowers just wanted circles around them. They just wouldn't have it any other way. And then I got the idea of more circles in the negative space creating those orange peel-like shapes around the flowers. So, turn the quilt we did. 50 times. I think I was in too much of a rush to notice how unpleasant it was. 

I bound it with leftover fabrics from the front. I just picked the ones that went the best with the colors on the back. 

I really like everything about this quilt, and I can easily see me doing another one someday. Just not in 2 weeks:)

Linking up to Crazy Mom Quilts for her Finish it Friday series. 

Dear Kona,

Please change the name of the following color from Lagoon to the more descriptive "Water Soluble Pen Blue".

Sincerely Yours,

Wish I could have found the gray pencil

It's a wonder I function in society

I had it in my mind that Meighan was coming home this Saturday. Maybe because she originally planned to and then changed her mind? Maybe because I'm in a hurry to get her here?

As I thought about Meighan's little three-year-old daughter, Athena, leaving behind her daddy and brother (just for a couple of months while the brother finishes the school year), and the only grandmother and home she's ever known, spending a whole day traveling, and coming to a strange place with strange people, I started wondering if there was anything at all I could do to make the transition easier for her. My first thought was to have my daughter pick out a toy to give her when she gets here, but of course, I also thought of a quilt. I tried for 4 days to talk myself out of the incredible rush of making an entire quilt in about a week, but as I was driving Friday, I remembered this quilt I'd seen on Pinterest. Such a simple quilt as that could be made in a week, couldn't it? It wasn't long before I was in Hobby Lobby gathering a small stack of solids, plus some flannel for the back. Not only is our climate much cooler than she is used to, but they will be sleeping in our den which is cooler than the upstairs. Plus, when it comes to something comforting, you just can't beat a flannel backed quilt! 

So I spent all day Saturday making the background blocks, and making the petals with Wonder Under attached. Then I spent all day Sunday attaching the petals with a machine blanket stitch. Then I spent all day Monday putting the little yellow circles in the center of the flowers, assembling the top, and making the back. (In the interest of simplicity and time, I decided to forgo the stems and leaves you see in the original.) 

Meighan sent me a message Monday morning that said something about Friday, so here I was with a quilt that had to be basted, quilted, and bound and I was going to have one less day to do all that than I was expecting! Plus, since I quilted absolutely all weekend, my house was a disaster, I still had some shopping to do before they got here, and Tuesday - Friday are my work days. Panic was setting in. 

When my husband got home, I mentioned that Meighan was going to be here this Friday at noon and he seemed surprised. He said "I thought she was going to wait until the middle of the month." I said "the 12th?" He said, this Friday isn't the 12th. That required a quick check of my phone to verify, and sure enough, this Friday isn't the 12th. During my extreme relief at having a whole other week to complete my project, I decided to re-read her message to make sure I got the date right. Wanna read it? 

"Plane tickets booked! I'll be leaving here 4/12 at 3:00pm, and arriving in Chattanooga 4/13 at 11:53am."

Not only did I get the week wrong, I got the day wrong as well - she is getting here on a Saturday. And that, ladies, is what happens when I try to process information before taking my ADD meds. 

But you don't care about all that, do you? You want to see the quilt top!

Isn't that adorable! I just love it. I think, especially for such a young child, that I like it even better without the stems and leaves. 

So. The back. It was supposed to have been an ice cream cone print that used a lot of purple only slightly lighter than the purple I intended to bind this with. 

Except I somehow cut it wrong! I bought 2 yards, which was just enough for the 50" x 60" top. I cut a piece big enough to go across the back, and then I was to cut the rest lengthwise and sew them together to add to the bottom. Somehow, I got confused and cut it width of fabric so the resulting strip was about 5" too short. 

Then, and only then, did I remember some great flannel I had picked up on clearance last year. And check this out, it matches better anyway!

They're not super noticeable from any distance, but it even has blue dots as the center of the flowers that go great with the blue in the quilt: 

I managed to cut this one correctly, but will probably change my binding plans since this backing doesn't have any purple. I've already cut purple strips for the binding, but I guess I'll just find another use for those. I somehow cut out extra blocks of every color & white anyway, so maybe they'll go with those. I consider the backing a happy accident because I'm much happier with this backing anyway. 

But this, ladies, is one example of what happens when I quilt after my ADD meds have worn off. I'm telling you, I don't even know how I've come this far in life without them. 

What are you working on this week?

Linking up to Freshly Pieced for her WIP Wednesday, Quilt Story for her Fabric Tuesday, and Crazy Mom Quilts for Finish it Friday. Lots of fun linking parties! 

She's coming home

I am already reeling from the events of this week, and it's Tuesday. It's one thing if a week kicks your butt by Friday, but Tuesday??

You see, my step-daughter, the one I made Tetris for, was in town this weekend. That sounds innocent and normal enough, doesn't it? Except she was in town from Hawaii. And due to this great distance, we haven't seen her in 4 years. And, it gets better - she was here on a JOB INTERVIEW, as in, if she gets the job, she moves back here!! And guess what - she did!!

Meighan moved to Hawaii to study the Korean language right out of high school, but then she met a nice native, married him and had 2 babies. We haven't even met the youngest one (yet). We never did like her moving so very far away, and we've liked it even less since the birth of our daughter. One of Meighan's is a year older & one is 2 years younger than our daughter. How wonderful, we've said a thousand times, if we could raise them together, like cousins.

I married Meighan's father when she was 13, and she left us when she was 18. So I think it should tell you something about her that I decided she was one of my favorite people during what is arguably the least attractive phase of a person's life. I'm not saying she didn't have any typical teenage attitudes, but I could see it - the kindness, the gentleness, the acceptance of people different from herself, the strength. Then, and even more now, she's someone you really want to just spend time with, someone you want to talk to over a cup of coffee. I'm so very happy to know that I'll have that opportunity on a regular basis from now on. It was so nice to see her as an adult, calmer, and without all of the insecurities that plagued her as a teen.

So, that was the good of the weekend. The bad is that my daughter chose to celebrate all this by waking at 2 in the morning throwing up, and continuing to throw up for 16 hours. On Meighan's last day here, I was operating on 3 hours of sleep and just not good for anything. We had intended to take her to one of our family's favorite restaurants for dinner, but when we found out it was closed, I just didn't have it in me to plan or cook a celebration dinner. We ended up with Kentucky Fried Chicken, and I just had to laugh. This huge, life-altering event, and we're celebrating with KFC. I've promised her a proper dinner either when she gets back in a couple of weeks, or when her husband joins her in a couple of months.

For now, I have to find it in me to concentrate on life as normal, get my work done, and hopefully scout out some housing options for her.

The Salt Air Battle

Did you ever have a batch of fabric just wear you out? You bought it innocently enough, knowing you loved it, but when it came time to decide what to do with it, you met roadblocks at every turn. Salt Air has done that for me. The minute I saw it, I knew I had to have it, but other projects kept it on the shelf until just recently.

The whole time I've had it, my plan has been to make the pattern Wedding Bands by Judy Martin:

Salt Air has such beautiful shades of peach and what I call seafoam green that I could just picture the background in 4 shades of one of those colors with the stars made out of the other colors in the line. The day came for me to get serious about ordering some solids, but when I pulled out my Kona card I could only find one or two coordinating colors, finding 4 peaches or 4 greens (or blues, or grays, or reds, or creams, or golds) just wasn't going to happen. I tried googling to see what solids other people used, and that's when I learned that Moda Bella solids are designed to have matching solids for any Moda line. So I ordered a Moda Bella color card, but honestly, the Kona colors matched better. (Still glad I have the Bella card for future use.)

So, I abandoned that pattern completely and went off searching for another. Judy Martin has so many beautiful quilts in her book, Stellar Quilts, and I struggled with a few of those patterns, trying to make this fabric fit, but I finally accepted that it just didn't. Which left me absolutely at square one.

I googled obsessively, and saw some fabulous quilts, but most people treated this line "scrappy" and I just couldn't let go of the fact that I didn't want to do that. One aspect of this line is the huge range of value within each color. I seemed to prefer when the different fabrics of one color line were together to show that off, rather than all the colors mixed together. With all the colors, you just don't notice the shading as much.

(See - aren't they gorgeous?)

Based on that, it took an embarrassingly long time for me to decide to limit the color palate and let go of the idea of using all the fabrics in the bundle. Once I did that, I instantly thought of the hopscotch pattern I bought last year and very happily settled on the grays, blues, and greens for the triangles, and the reds for the diamonds that make up the stars. (The pattern uses blue & white for these diamonds, so the star is not readily visible.)

(By Camile if there's any way possible you did not already know that.)

So excited was I that I immediately settled on Kona peach for the center of the triangles and, wanting a little extra just in case, bought 2 1/2 yards instead of the 1-3/4 yard the pattern called for. Wait, did you notice the dash? Because I obviously didn't. The difference between 1-3/4 yard & 1 3/4 yard is a whole yard, because the first is telling you to buy one 3/4 yard piece of fabric and the other is telling you to buy one AND 3/4 yards of fabric. So, what I have is one AND 3/4 yards too much fabric. Good thing it's pretty.

And in case you think Salt Air is through kicking my butt, the seams come together at an angle rather than straight on, so they don't nestle. It's the same issue I had with the Pam Kitty Morning quilt - without nestled seams, getting perfect alignment is based on nothing other than your degree of accuracy in both cutting and sewing. My results with Pam Kitty Morning were pretty darn close, but since Hopscotch is all biased edges, it doesn't matter how careful or accurate I am, something is going to stretch or wobble and throw me off. I did starch my fabrics very well, but a biased edge is a biased edge. I spent several hours on this yesterday, and while I have some really decent blocks to show for it, it was too much work. There has to be a trick - some way to insure decently matching seams.

Lucky for us, well, for me anyway - maybe you're smart enough to not get caught in this position - there is a trick, called a positioning pin, and Connecting Threads cared enough about us to explain it in great detail.

All of that to say, I think I'm going to win the Salt Air battle after all.

Linking up to Freshly Pieced for WIP Wednesday.