upcoming fun

• June 24, 2012 (Sun) -- Quilts in the Gardens
  . . The Miller Homestead on Stone Manse Drive in Allegheny County's South Park
  . . 1:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.; admission $2
  . . (412) 835-1554 or www.olivermiller.org for information
  
• September 21-22, 2012 (Fri-Sat) -- Peggy's Patchwork Pals Sixth Annual Quilt Show and Sale
  . . Slate Lick United Presbyterian Church, 106 Brown Road, Freeport, PA 16229
  . . 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Vendors and lunch will be available.
  . . For more information call Peggy Coriale (724) 295-3734 or Judy Kois (724) 337-1129

There was a show this weekend that I missed that I had wanted to go to, but thought it was happening in May. Missed my chance. I'm not aware of any other upcoming events this summer that I will be able to get to. Some of this is planning way in advance, but that's life as a grad student. Figure life out for the next six months, and it's pretty well set in stone. 

I cleaned house this weekend... sort of.  The upshot of all this:

1. Winter wardrobe and bedding is all put away. Mostly all in one container.
2. Clothes that I didn't wear for the entire season have been pulled out for resale/donation. 
3. I discovered that I have 2 bags of queen sized batting, 1 double, and 4 [four, priced at $2 a pop from thrift stores] of baby/crib batting stashed in a closet. Fab.U.Louis.
4. In removing my CD collection from the bookshelf to the fireplace cubby, I freed up space for more craft related things to be stored with all the other craft related things. 

The downside is that I can't find anything. Missing in action:

1. My rotary cutters. The new Gingher, the pretty owl-covered Fiskers. Gone. Probably hanging out with the missing floral enameled Gingers that I haven't been able to find since I moved last May. 
2. My acrylic rulers. All three of them. 
3. Kaleidoscopic Heart and Human Again. I had set these albums aside to lend to people

Some bonus action: the sampler is done! After a lot of seam releasing, restitching, and additional patchwork construction to fill in new holes, I got the sashing stitched on sometime Saturday. 

It is now 5th in a queue of quilts waiting to be basted with a back and batting. I'll finish them all eventually. Maybe it's time to schedule the long arm quilting lessons...

spring break, deux

with the help of Jinny Beyer's "The Quilter's Album of Patchwork Patterns", I did some more work on the sampler. Had I done a little more traveling across the United States, I would lack for no shortage of blocks with state names, roads, and other assorted locations and things of historical importance. Alas that my travels across the States have been limited. Alas that there are few blocks having to do with anywhere international

because none of my layouts would be complete with out Lydia 's approval

I ended up doing a lot of small piece work with no particular pattern to help make up deficits in size between the pieced sections. The bobbin is for scale purposes. Jinny Beyer was incredibly helpful in providing some piecing ideas - the coral and pink squares in the right photograph were taken from a larger block. 

Something I hadn't thought about was the semaphore alphabet - flags used, for maritime purposes, to send messages. Each flag represents a letter of the alphabet, but alone has some other attached meaning. In Erie, Pa, on the Bayfront, is the Erie Convention Center. It's a lovely facility, with a hotel build next-door, and they are connected by a skywalk. The sign at the front of the property has ERIE spelled in semaphore flags. 

Sew... if they can do it on the Bayfront, why can't I do it in a quilt and pop my signature in there? Unfortunately, spring break was far too short, and I didn't actually finish this project. I was close, but I had neglected to iron the patchwork as I went, which was an incredible error. It meant that I spent the last night of my stay at home ripping out seams to keep the piece from buckling in places. But, there's always the next visit home. Maybe by then I'll have a sashing picked out.

spring break

I'm visiting with my parents for a few days over spring break, and I decided to try to wade some of the left-behind fabric. Probably not a good idea, but then, neither was stumbling upon www.ikeahackers.net.

In the flotsam and jetsam of fabric, I found a B&N bag with patches in it from a long abandoned sampler project. After a few hours of frogging seams, I remember why.

this is nothing that goes together! most of these aren't even the same size! oh, to be young and foolish again...

so I spent the afternoon trying to make sense of it. I had decided initially to sash things to make them fit with other blocks. In some cases, this was fine, in others, it was a very disruptive attempt at order our of chaos.

I did a web search of "sampler quilts" and was slightly dissapointed to not find anything like this. What I noticed, and what was less surprising was that most of the samplers followed some sort of colorway, which this does not. There were a few interesting mod sampler quilts. Again, they had an organized and preempted colorway.

I honestly can't remember why I made this design choice. This project exploded from a long past issue of Quilt Sampler Magazine. The article off of which the sample project was based had made two projects for her sons, each one telling his life's story up until that point. I probably had some romantic notion about a story in blocks, which is why I forged ahead as a novice with out a second thought to picking a colorway, as the article's quilter had. To my delight, there is enough commonality between certain blocks that the color families are similar.

To my dismay, the blocks are of such uneven sizes that I will probably have to make a few more before this is all over. Looking at some of the mod quilts, I thought it possible to piece together the blocks into chunks, then sash the sample chunks together with a solid background, letting the chunks float as mini quilts in one larger piece.

Perhaps I'll just wait to see how far this last ditch stitching effort gets me.