Blogger's Quilt Festival Spring 2015: Blue & yellow 9-patch tiles

What can I say about this quilt that isn't more than a little bit embarrassing?  I guess I will just jump in:  In February 2009 the Facebook Quilt Block Swap Group...did not exist.  It was still a mailing list in those days.  & our swap block that month was 6.5" unfinished/6" finished equal-parts 9-patch of any kind limited to (mostly) blue & yellow fabrics.

What surprised me most was the variety of 9-patches we got!  These are nine of them, set on point (first framed in a plain bleached muslin border to make them a uniform size) & then sashed in blue & yellow strips I had kicking around.  What could be easier, right?

Unfortunately this top was finished sometime in ?2010? & then sat until almost the end of April 2015 before it was basted & quilted.  It would have sat longer but in a fit of I-don't-know-what-I-was-thinking, I entered it in a quilt show.  Not yet quilted.  Because I am like that.  I basted it not having the faintest idea how I was going to quilt it (I mean I knew HOW, I was going to use my Bernina & cotton thread but the pattern was up in the air).

After it was basted & rolled (I more or less always knew I would begin corner to corner), I settled on a square flags sort of thing.  I could tell you it was inspired by Buddhist prayer flags (which it could be) but really, I was also cleaning some old house stuff files & found Corian samples from when we redid our kitchen.  I started playing with them.  Truly, playing.  Mostly I was making clicking noises with them.  The quilt just happened to be on the table; yes, I have the world's shortest attention span. 
After it was all done, I recognized the Corian sample was the same square dimension as a single unit of the patch of the 9-patches:  2 inches more or less.  This is probably why the shape & size of those squares looked "right".  Also, they make a cool mahjong tile clicking sound.  But if anyone asks I am going with Buddhist prayer flags from now on.

I quilted it in a variegated very pale blue & white cotton thread.  The thread is so pale I was surprised how much the stitching does show in the pale blue border sashing scraps.  because I was quilting when I could find the time, it all got done rather piecemeal. Sooooo.  The corner to corner nature of things got twisted around as I lost my place & those Buddhist prayer flags are just blowing every which way.  

The quilt went to the every-two-years quilt show held by the Tree City Quilt Guild in Gainesville, FL & then came home a week ago Sunday.  It was hanging on the wall during bookclub earlier this week & M****** saw it for the first time & immediately recognized the blue sashing strip as scraps from a blue & white quilt currently on her couch.  This quilt was more collaborative than I even realized!

This quilt is 50" x 50" ; it is actually square!  It was made from all cotton fabrics as far as I know & 100% batting- of this I am certain.  It was quilted with a cotton thread which is probably a factor in why the stitching is very visible, even on the same shade of pale blue fabric.  I am entering it in the Home Machine Quilted category at the Blogger's Quilt Festival for Spring 2015. 

Blogger's Quilt Festival Spring 2014: Everything's coming up roses

I have finished exactly ONE quilt since the beginning of the year so my options for the Spring 2014 Blogger's Quilt Festival were a bit limited.  Unfortunately, I have also already blogged about the quilt twice. 

The first time was for 52 Photos Project prompt A Crooked Line & the second time was for a Block Lotto linky post about color.  So without further ado here is the quilt I made as a gift to the couple who had my cow bred (so folksy, right).  He is the Dexter cattle fan (& rancher) but she has a landscaping business with a special interest in heirloom roses so my primary fabric choice was easy-peasy (it was not until afterwards that I thought about how many Einstein-themed gifts we get-they were still very gracious about it).



It may not be obvious at first glance (I think it is, but I already know) but this block is a revamp of a Block Lotto block I have taken to calling 8:56 (four to nine).   The original block pattern begins with equal parts of two fabrics & then a narrow slice is taken top to bottom & another side to side there is some flipping & voilà.  I am beyond fond of this pattern & have made several times it before & I am certain I will make it over & over again & even give this variation another roll.

In this most recent incarnation, I played with the dimensions of that center slice making it gradually wider as I worked my way out from the center.  I was mostly interested in seeing how the larger cuts actually diminished the punch of color; the highest contrast seems, to me anyhow, to be in the blocks with the most unequally sized individual pieces.  Because I varied the size of the cuts there is just that one center seam to match (except that one place where I accidentally bumped two blocks with the same size cuts up against each other WHOOPS!) so this quilt went together super-quick.  After al that cutting is done which can be exhausting.

As for the quilting:  the fabric had a vaguely geometric quality & I wanted to pick that up.  I used a wide piece of bleached white muslin so no center seam would interrupt the design (which was just a happy accident).  I made several starkly triangle "roses" in a variegated pink to yellow thread & then outlined them in dark green thread making ever larger triangles until they started bumping up against each other & then I threw in some jagged thorns in between.  I was going for a sharply angled bouquet sort of look, but I am not sure it worked. 

The quilting (& the piecing for that matter) was done on my Bernina 153 which I still love.  I have flirted with getting a new machine, but somehow they never feel right; this machine is the right size for me.  On the small side by today's standards, I can still jam a queen sized quilt through it if need be. 

This quilt finished at just over 54" x 54".  The fabrics are all cottons mostly from my scrap basket except of course for the yardage of that rose fabric.  The batting is 70% cotton/30% polyester (my preferred batting for quick free-motion quilting).  The thread was a YLI variegated & a Sulky solid dark green.

& as I said when we went to pick up our dairy cow (baby due in December fingers crossed), they took such wonderful care of her I wanted to say extra-thank you.  Because while Cow-girl is standoffish & maybe even ill-suited to the whole backyard diary thing she is MY cow & I love her. 

I have entered this quilt in the Home Machine Quilted category of the Blogger's Quilt Festival.  & because I adds up to 216" all around, it is also in the Small Quilts category. 

Bloggers Quilt Festival Autumn 2013: Bird Trap, the first

Ordinarily I try to put something not before posted in the Blogger's Quilt Festival but I am still in love Love LOVE with the Bird Trap Quilt.  So everyone who has had too much of this quilt, just scroll through & look at the pictures (they are mostly new, I promise) but for new-to-Bird-Trapers here is the short version:

I became enamored of an image of a quilt I saw in a book (Maude Wahlman's Signs & Symbols: African Images in African American Quilts), specifically Pecolia Warner's Bird Trap Quilt which I am pretty sure resides at The Belger Arts Center in Kansas City, Mississippi although I have never seen it in person. You can see a close up of the inspiration for my Bloggers Quilt Festival entry here, but if you are really interested there are more pictures in the book or even better you could call The Belger Arts Center (something I have never done) & ask them if you could see it in person.

& before I get even more distracted with the story of this quilt, let me give the vitals.  This quilt measures  56" wide by 60" tall more or less.  It was pieced & quilted on my home machine a Bernina 153.  Bird Trap was assembled this year (2013) using blocks that were also made in 2013 mostly although the first samples were made in late 2012.  I entered bird Trap in the Autumn 2013 Blogger's Quilt Festival scrappy quilts & home machine quilted quilts.  When I entered this quilt in a show earlier this year, I put it in art quilts, but only because it didn't really fall into the other categories, which were mostly variations on pieced.

The blocks came more or less right out of my head, after being kick started by the original, with the exception of the pieced birds.  Those birds are NOT foundation pieced, they came from a Block Lotto pattern earlier this year that I altered (big surprise).  The quilt top is all cotton....I think.  I spent some time rooting round in old remnant bins, scrap bags, etc. & the origin of that black & white gingham is a bit sketchy. 

The back of the quilt is a single piece of bleached muslin, with leftover bird trap parts making the label.  There really isn't much to see here except maybe the quilting, which is my lazy version of corner to corner (I neither mark the lines, nor do I always go all the way to the corner).

The arrangements of the blocks was even less organized.  I started with a center block, thinking it would be a 3x3 arrangement.  I picked my nine blocks.  They were, if you are curious the three blocks in the middle of the top row  & the two rows of three that kinda fall beneath them.  Then I got distracted making birds & sort of swung those in at the side & then the lower left birds became a panel & then it all went to hell.  When I said this all to my husband he said he could see it, the off-center center & the pushed out sides & maybe you can, too.

Now for the quilt story extended mix: I fell so immediately & completely for the elements of this block pattern that I have trouble seeing it today without wondering what is WRONG with people who are not similarly afflicted.  On the flip side my mother said she thought this was one of the ugliest things she had ever seen anyone do on purpose & label "art"*.  I like to think she has since changed her mind; she certainly came on board when I started putting up pictures of blocks based oh-so-loosely on the original.  I say oh-so-loosely because I more or less skipped over the historical references, meanings & went straight to listing the shapes & other varieties that most of the blocks had in common.  Yes, I am a philistine. 

So that it part one.  Part two is that the Facebook Quilt Block Swap group, while more popular every day had become a bit of a snooze for me.  I was sort of tired of thinking up limited feature blocks or themes or whatever & throwing them out there.  There has to be some unifying feature after all, a particular block or range of colors or whatever & it began to feel same-y  Don't get me wrong I enjoy it more than I don't (I wouldn't do it if I didn't, it's not like I get paid), it's just that by the time any swap actually happens I am sick of looking at it.

In my defense, I make several of every block whether I like it or not, in order to work out the written directions, etc. & I often get to the other end wishing I could start over with something just a bit further down the creative road.  I think I heard/read once that Alex Van Halen wished they could record the album at the end of the tour after they had really explored the music but of course, if you do that no one comes to the concert because they don't know what you are playing & that is just bad business.  Despite being a drummer, I suspect AVH might have more brains than a bag of hair-not that I think drummers are stoopid, my husband was a drummer & he is smarter than most people about most things. .

Where was I?  Oh right, Alex Van Halen if he ever said that & if he were a quilter syndrome.  So I was percolating a year-long, less guidance from me type swap (which became the Rainbow Connection & was hugely popular, if you are curious) & in the way these things happen -to me anyhow- instead of one idea I ended up with two & I couldn't really decide which was better.  So I floated them both.  As I said Rainbow Connection caught like a wildfire & I think I could run it another year, but I am not going to because even with minimal guidance from me I am a little burned out on ROYGBP.

Bird Trap has been so much slower & I don't much care because I LOVE it.  I am still loving it; yes I have enough for another 3x3 block arrangement & am still making more.  You could love it, too:  sign up is open until Hallowe'en & the blocks aren't due until the last Saturday in November.  To be fair, it took me more than a month to settle into the pattern- more like four, minimum- so I'm not sure jumping in now would be as much fun as jumping in ten months ago was.  Of course you can always join our 2014 swap What Burgoyne Begat.

*October 27, 2013: I should clarify, it was the inspiration quilt my mom spoke ill of, not my quilt.  She says nothing but nice things to me about my own quilts.

Blogger's Quilt Festival: Spring Break

The Blogger's Quilt Festival opened on ?Friday?  I think....?  This is no reflection on the Blogger's Quilt Festival; I have been very out of it for a month now (nothing to do with quilting, just in case you thought I had fabric induced dementia or something). 

This go round the festival is broken down into categories, which I guess I understand.  There is no question that one big list of links could be overwhelming.   Still, I think it is worth a cruise through even the categories that don't much interest me (I'm sorry art quilt makers & professional quilt quilters; if it helps I know I am a philistine).  In the end my favorite quilt is often a quilt I know I never would, never could make.

& now for my entry:

After no thought at all, I decided my quilt belonged in the bed quilt category.  Because it is on a bed.  My parent's bed, to be precise.  The bed is an old-fashioned, not often seen anymore, garden variety double bed.  & while the quilt does look like an old fashioned pattern, it isn't. 

After I cruised around the festival I realized my quilt could go in more than one category, so I also put it in home machine quilted quilts because it was, although I know I deserve no particular accolades.   My style of machine quilting is to sort of slowly push the balled up quilt around while I do what I am told looks like really lame yoga poses that all seem to involve my arms being held out straight, locked at the elbows.  I call this technique "free motion with walking foot".  The result is wavy irregular lines that sometimes look more like... ehrmmmm... stylized lady parts than I ever Ever EVER intended. 

Once this was pointed out to me (yes, it had to be pointed out), I started quilting in a more or less diagonal pattern, limiting the swoops & swirls & that was fine.  Until SOMEONE asked why I was not doing anymore yoni quilting (her words, not mine) & I thought "oh screw it, yoni quilting it is" & have started doing it again. 


With almost no changes (one change, which I will go into in a bit & maybe another), it is the Spring Break quilt pattern from Atkinson Designs' pattern book Spring Cleaning. 

Spring Break is another one of those quilt tops I made in abundance.  Off the top of my head I can think of five quilts I made from this pattern, soup to nuts, on purpose.  I also once taught a (very poorly attended) workshop using this quilt as a jumping off point, so I guess I could say I was in on those as well.  As it is what could be described as "cutting intensive" & so I have also cut up scraps for it & then handed them off as well as received fabric cut by others... 

In short, I have had a hand in at least a dozen versions of this quilt.  But this one is the first one I made all by myself, cutting to piecing to basting to quilting.  I honestly cannot remember if I bound it.  I certainly MADE the binding but I might have sent it off for mom to bind.  Because I do that.  Also, I think it may have been a Mother's Day gift that showed up MONTHS late.  Which also sounds like me.

I tried to take a picture of just one block so you could see what makes it so cutting intensive, but alas the fabrics I choose (with the idea they would match the bedroom of the recipients, which I think it does) are so soft & blurry you cannot really see the contrast.  In fact, when I blew up the whole bed picture at the top and below, I realized it looks like there are dirty pillow cases on the bed!  There are not.  It is just that what it took to bring out some contrast in the quilt blocks also brought out every shadow of the ordinary wrinkles of the pillow, making it looks like a brylcreem aficionado sleeps there (he isn't).

Lastly I tried to get a whole quilt picture but it was December 24th & one of the room's residents was getting dressed for his once-a-year appearance & somehow I never made it back in there with the camera.

This is almost the only angle you can almost see the one change I am quite sure I made, though.  The quilt top itself is 5x6, that is five blocks across by six blocks long for a total of thirty blocks.  I think.  Which might be a deviation from the suggested layouts, but if it is it is a small one.  Then there is a narrow border around the whole thing & finally, wide borders on the left & right sides & the bottom which do not connect, giving the whole thing a distorted T-shaped layout.  The concave corners allow the quilt top to hang snug to the mattress without getting caught up on the footboard.  This is a fairly common feature in New England quilts, but not often seen (at least not by me) anywhere else. 

& my digital quilt label:

Finished Size is approximately 69 inches wide by 73 inches long

Pieced & quilted by me on my Bernina 153

Pattern is, as stated above, Atkinson Designs Spring Break from the book Spring Cleaning

 

 

If you came here through the Block Lotto Weekend Update, I hope you will hippity hop back to the beginning of the Blogger's Quilt Festival & if you came through the quilt festival, please do pay a visit to the Block Lotto.

Blogger's Quilt Festival: Poulet pays à quatre minute à neuf

It was my intention to get this quilt done & shipped off (walked next door) last spring but, well, too much happened.  A lot happened here & a lot happened there.  Ordinarily what goes on next door does not impact my free time one iota but in this case there was a death in her family, which meant W***** was out-of-state for right around 3 weeks.  She meant to go for just the weekend but discovered more unfinished business than expected when she got there.  & back here, we were having henhouse problems & assorted other issues on both properties & since I had to deal for me, it only made sense to deal for her.

As a result, this quilt, which had already been delayed was delayed further & did not get into her hands until this very October.  Doubly sad as I have PICTURES of the blocks on my blog dated March....2011.

The pattern is straight forward.  I got it from Block Lotto, made numerous blocks in the red & white colorway that was part of the direction.  It didn't take the link to the source pattern (where Block Lotto seems to have gotten it, although I am not trying to suggest this is the first place it appeared ever in the history of quilting & the internet) for me to realize this block had potential with my favorite & most useless kind of fabric, large scale novelties with peculiar subjects.

Enter chickens.  Chickens wearing bandanas.  Chickens wearing bandanas with endearments written underneath them.  Chickens wearing bandanas with endearments written underneath them in French.  Anyone who knows me will realize that of course I bought the remaining fabric on the bolt.  There was not a little & it is already almost gone. 

I am still calling the block 8:56 (4 to 9) or en français: quatre minute à neuf heures.  & they are country chickens (poulet pays), although I suppose what with the colors, etc. they could be gangsta chickens...  Turns out, there is no google translate for gangsta, so I guess I will stick with country. Yes, I realize that this all mock-french, but it will work for me.

The finished quilt measures  56"x56" more or less, just the right size for a lap or a nap.  It was pieced & quilted on my Bernina, 153 Quilters Edition.  I used an irregular on-the-diagonal stripe which I have used before.  In addition to being a bit snazzier (& easier) than a regular side to side stripe, I have learned it wears well & so it is my default quilting for anything I know is likely to see regular use & thus regular washing.

Lastly there is a display sleeve on the back, machine stitched at the same time as the binding to the front.  Under ordinary circumstances I would consider this a strictly utilitarian quilt, but I know W*****'s entire house is decorated in chickens & I suspect this might get hung up as often as it is used.

So, here it is, my entry for the Autumn 2012 Blogger's Quilt Festival.  All my previous Blogger's Quilt Festival entries can be seen here.

Blogger’s Quilt Festival Stats

Finished quilt measures : 56″ x 56"

Quilted & pieced by : me on a Bernina 153

Best Category : Throw Quilt, Scrap Quilt, Home Machine Quilted Quilt

Blogger's Quilt Festival: Little Gem

I know photos2fabric quilts are ho-hum for some, but I have fallen in love with the technique.  It probably doesn't hurt that I am OBSESSED with the University of Florida Herbarium.    Like the Nymphaeaceae I entered in May 2011, this is a central photo of a specimen collected at the Kanapaha Botanical Garden.

& so, my entry in the May 2012 Blogger's Quilt Festival:  Little Gem.  The central image was printed (by me) on a deskjet, as was the information label on the back (it is the label information from the FLAS # 211550 specimen itself).  The frame is one of my favorite piecing techniques, foundation-free strings.  That's when you make giant sheets of varied-width strips & then cut them on a 45degree angle & then work with all that open bias on every edge (I will give you a hint though, the seams of the strips are actually quite stabilizing; I would rather work with a foundation-free string block than any other block  with just one open biased edge).

The frame is machine quilted but the medallion image is hand stitched.  A friend was kind enough to open her vast embroidery floss collection & we matched the colors in the blossom as closely as we could.

Broken dishes from years ago

I thought about sitting out this Blogger's Quilt Festival, mostly because we have been in the throws (& I do mean throws) of a kitchen remodel & I have nothing new & nothing I have not already blogged about &....&...

I was wrong.  This month, over on the Block Lotto, I submitted three Broken Dishes blocks for the October Sampler Lotto.  & then I went hunting through my blog for photos of the Broken Dishes quilt I made my step-father.  It turns out I have no blog entry & no complete photos of it at all, YIKES!

This quilt hung in a Veteran's Day 2006 quilt show before it went on to it's final home.  For reasons I am not clear on, it was hung upside down, so that instead of the label being in the lower right corner (& oriented correctly when folded up in the usual way of looking at quilt labels on hanging quilts), it was folded over itself.  No other quilt in the show was hung this way (including another I made with a similar label right-side-up when you lift the corner type deal).  Anyhow, it means the only picture I have does not show the whole quilt top.  

Trust me though, it is the same all over, Broken Dishes alternating with Snowballs to make a woven sort-of criss-cross pattern.  I used the same fabric for the center of the Snowballs, the corner squares of the outer border & the narrow inner border.  All the others were scraps in shades of blue, light & dark meeting in the center.

This quilt was made especially for my step-father & happened to coincide with a quilt show honoring veterans, so I made a label with photos of him in the service & more recently fishing & a blurb of how he spent his time, specifically building quonset huts during the Korean War.  I don't usually go in for such elaborate labels, but this was a special case. 

Nowadays the quilt lives in my parent's den, over the back of the rocking chair he sits in every night to watch Pardon My Interruption, college basketball & what-have-you.  I see it every time I visit & have never thought to take a better picture.

Nymphaeaceae

I have so many many not-quite-finished projects, but when it came time to spotlighting a finished quilt for the Blogger's Quilt Festival, I could not believe how many of my finished quilts have already been covered in my blog.  Virtually every one I had here that I could take a picture of or had taken a picture before I shipped it off has already been shown here.  With one exception: Nymphaeaceae.

Quite some time ago (yea, I could look it up or I could just move on), a floristic inventory of the local botanical garden was begun & a while after that it was mostly finished; these things are never finished-finished.  As it was wrapping up, the wife of the inventoryer, the guy collecting & identifying one of everything in the garden, & I took a fraction of the digital images & made a quilt for a show at the museum of natural history (they were having a quilting natural fladidah-themed exhibit) & we made this.  Meanwhile, the manager of the collection was doing everything in his power to make things easier for us.  By everything, I mean everything, including re-prioritizing what specimens got mounted & photographed when so we could get the images we needed ASAP & not taking it to heart when they turned out not to be quite what we wanted & oh, could we have this instead?

In the course of this whole process, it became very, Very, VERY clear which image was his favorite.  He used it for buttons on the website, he used it as his screen saver; everywhere he could squeeze it in, he squeezed.  When we finished our main project & started planning our Thanks For All Your Help project there was no other choice. 

As with all the images for our original quilt, I printed the images on 100% cotton using the Bubblejet product & an HP Photosmart printer.  We used a single close up of the primary image for the center of the front & several others that we cut up to incorporate into the sawtooth border.  As patterns go, it is not complex; we wanted to be careful that the quilt layout not clash with the image we were trying to highlight.  For the back, we printed the whole specimen with label.  While not particularly important in terms of the quilt, it is (almost) the most important part to an herbarium manager. The whole thing is less than 30" x 30"

If you want to see the original specimen (kind of) you can search for accession number 214601 thru 214601 at the collection search page.

Blogger's Quilt Festival: Turtles All Around

I have already blogged about this quilt this year, but you can show a quilt more than once so long as it's not at the same show, right? That is what I told myself, anyhow so I could put it in the Blogger's Quilt Festival.

Turtles All Around started with a package of nine batik turtle squares & a family friend obsessed with turtles.  I had a vague idea of doing a disappearing 9-patch, keeping the turtles in one of the corners where they would not get sliced.  Alas, those batik turtle blocks were not remotely square; they were not even the same dimensions.  Once I had trimmed each disappearing 9-patch to match the turtle blocks, not one matched another in either shape or size.

& so, once again, I used the sashing I always use to rescue odd blocks.  You can see how not-square the blocks are in this close up, but by adding this irregular sashing & then squaring them by cutting only from same sashing, I did end up with perfectly square squares & everything else fell into place.  Making the sashing from the same fabric I used for the (sliced) center squares also helped smooth the rough edges.

As re-read this, I am realizing it sounds like I am ho-hum on this quilt. I am not.  I love this quilt.  I love the busy batiks that still somehow work together.  I am even pleased with the quilting, as it came out looking water-y, another happy accident.

My only regret is not having a picture AFTER the binding got turned.  As with so many of my projects, I took the quilt just this far & then sent it to Mom, who bound it, sewed in any strays I missed, & just in general did the finishing work that takes so much time (& for which I have no talent/patience).  Thanks Mom!

Blogger's Quilt Festival: Something Yellow

I made this quilt primarily from scraps from a quilt I made my mother.  I made that quilt to match her room, which is primarily soft blues & corals, as is that quilt.  Then I took those scraps, mixed them with other scraps (the leftover triangles from churn dash blocks, if you must know), & still more scraps & I am not sure how it happened... because I have never made... but I got Something Yellow.

The block is a famous one, if only I could remember the name! It is a 9-patch in which each patch of the nine patch is made up of a 4-patch of 1/2 squares triangles, except for three across the center, corner-to-corner in a tic-tac-toe style.  Yes, the name of the block would be easier.  Soooo I made nine of them (9-patch again) & they make a good sized lap/nap quilt. 

The back of the quilt is a surprisingly similar color-way:  a goldy brown background with fleur de lis of yellows, oranges & powder blues.  I have no idea why I bought it, if you asked me I would have said it was not my thing at all, but apparently it very much IS.  As you can see, the quilt back precisely matches my dog.

As for the quilting:  because it was made from scraps & because I elected to go borderless a certain amount of yanking around was needed to get this sucker to lay flat.  As a result, while the whole thing is pretty damn close to square (I swear, it is just being floaty in that picture up there), there are hardly any straight lines.  I was sick to death of all over meander designs (they start to get me in the neck), So it was quilted from one corner to the other in lines that are neither straight nor evenly spaced.

I do not care so much how not accurate the parts are as the quilt itself turned out just fine.  So just fine that I have started another one (not with scraps but with fabric actually chosen for it) & I plan to quilt in the same side-to-side-but-otherwise-no-thoughts pattern.

& this is my submission for the Blogger's Quilt Festival.

Blogger's Quilt Festival

It is time again for a virtual quilt show. This time it has coincided with my sister & her family moving into a new house. A new house with lots of empty walls. A new house with lots of empty walls & hardwood floors. A new house with lots of empty wall & hardwood floors that is in desperate need of soundproofing.

Not long after their closing, I asked for a roughly 5' square piece of wall & started on a hallowe'en quilt (which I will show you on hallowe'en), but as my mother so wisely pointed out a person would have trouble living with a hallowe'en quilt year-round even if they are within 100 miles of Salem, Massachusetts & crazy-sick for hallowe'en (which we kinda are).

So back to the scrap bag it was. & because the only direction I know how to go in is the opposite direction this is what we got:

The original 5" blocks were cut from scraps from other projects & originally intended to be used in a tossed/hidden/disappearing/whatever 9-patch type project but I lost interest. Also, they were not nearly different enough to give the effect I would want, so they have idled in a basket on my cutting table for 'a bit'. When this project needed doing, there they were all ready to be 9-patched.

When it came to sashing, I fell back on my old friend Reconciling the Disparate. Not because the blocks were not uniform but because it is the fastest sashing I know how to assemble, what with there being no corners to match. If you think you recognize the same blue polka-dot from my previous Blogger's Quilt Festival entry, what can I say, the strips were already cut out.

As for the yellow outer border, I really do not know what I was thinking. I have not actually decided how I feel about it but the daughter of the house the quilt is going to loves yellow & I used up the blue polka-dot in the sashing, but I had these strips of yellow gingham left-over & there was already gingham in the squares &....now you see how these things happen.

The quilting is what I call free-motion with walking foot. It works more or less as titled: I move the quilt sandwich is gradual arcs or semi-straight lines & do not worry too much about anything except overall density.

Finally the binding: would you believe I was drunk? Of course you would, but I actually was not. I just ran out of time in my rush to get this picture taken in time for Park City Girl's Bloggers Quilt Festival.

I was hoping the overall effect would be tiles in a garden. I have no idea how successful I was. I DO know that that room will not be quite so echo-ey as it was & a quilt of squares around a square will never be out of place in a Cape Cod.

Last but not, well maybe, least: in total sidebar news: this is my 115th post. Which is funny for many reasons but also because my original Bloggers Quilt Festival post was my 50th post. That is a lot of talking to myself.

Blogger's Quilt Festival

The idea is to choose my favorite quilt, show it & tell the story. This would of course require that I actually take pictures before I ship them off (sad admission for a professional record keeper, but there we are). But there is one quilt I do seem to make over & over again. It appeals to me in so many ways: it is graphic, it is simple while looking complex, & it is so forgiving we taught it at Arbor House helping new residents learn how to use their machines (& prove to them, no really you CAN make something) & that would be the Foundation Free String quilt.

The idea for the blocks had tumbled around in my brain for a while, but gelled when I saw the cover of Gwen Marsten's book Liberated String Quilts. I backed into the sashing (I call it Reconciling the Disparate; I am a big Daisy Parker fan) while trying to put together my guild's bingo block squares & discovering we had a size variation of more than 3/4" across the blocks & a shocking number of the squares were not square. This layout takes care of all that.

I really have lost track of how many of these I have made myself (10? 20?) & how many I have taught (30? more?) & I never stop being amazed at how different each one is, even when people share the same random pile of scraps. But of all of them that I have made, this is my favorite.

When C***** told me she had painted her bedroom black I thought "oh dear" & then when I saw it I could not believe how peaceful & restful it was. Black walls, windows with filmy white curtains & light blue accessories. It sounds gloomy but it really is one of the nicest bedroom color schemes I have ever seen. & this quilt was made especially for her in that room. I think what I love most about this quilt was my complete conviction that it would not come together (the black & white is tooo contrasting, the blue tooooo flat), but I used them because they were the colors I had to work with & it it turned out to be more than the sum of its parts.

//thank you Park City Girl for hostessing this great idea! & welcome to my 100th post.