by Nancy
Only a week and a half until All Together Week – yay! It seems that quite a few Crackpots are involved with painting projects (!), so I’ve taken it upon myself to sort through the comments and try to come up with a good project for the Crackpot Quilting Day. First of all, it seems that Crackpots are flexible – no one insisted on one thing or another – everyone just wanted to get together and sew. There was a preference for a collaborative quilt top rather than individual projects and a preference for standard piecing rather than paper piecing. So, here are a few possibilities I’ve come up with so far:
Friendship Star Block
It’s nice and easy – just squares and half square triangles, so I think we could make quite a few. I think it would look good with bright, small-scale prints for the stars and a light background fabric. I probably have enough of a background fabric so that we could use the same one throughout.
Snowball Nine Patch
I found this one while browsing around and thought it looked cool. Still pretty easy, though it might require a bit more planning if we want the square from the 9 patch to match the snowball that is touching it.
Spinner
This block is from Bonnie Hunter’s Addicted to Scraps column in the March/April ’10 issue of Quiltmaker. They have a picture of how it would look together with other blocks if you vary the color of the central star but keep the whites and reds.
Batik Scramble
Ok, this one is a little hard to explain, and unfortunately I don’t have a visual aid for it. (Have I mentioned how much I dislike the new Quiltmaker website? It’s impossible to find any useful information. Aargh! But I digress…) The pattern is Batik Scramble from Quiltmaker Sept/Oct ’09. But I would change it to make it Scrappy Rainbows Scramble. If you have a picture of the quilt, what you would do is turn the even numbered rows over so that they go the same way as the odd numbered rows and look like rainbows. Then you’d do one row of red, then orange, yellow, etc. If you don’t have a magazine to look at, suffice to say it would involve 5″ squares of scraps in ROYGBIV colors and 2.5″ squares of background fabric and a flip and stitch technique.
Double 4 Patch on Point
Imagine the block on the left on point, with a variety of colors for the small squares. There’s a quilt pattern called Wonder Baby from Sweet and Simple Baby Quilts by Mary Hickey, which some people may have noticed at Fields. It’s the quilt on the cover of the book, so you can get a glimpse of it here.
I have checked the book out from the library and have the complete pattern. I think it looks cute and fun.
Little Sister
This is from Quiltmaker Sept/Oct ’01 for those who go that far back.
It’s 9 patch blocks
on point, and the effect is similar to Wonder Baby.
Ok, Crackpots, that’s all I have time for. What looks good?
P.S. To the Creator of the Blog – I hope you are impressed by my Posting of Pictures from Other Sites and Linking skills. I’m mightily impressed with myself. 🙂
Well, goodness, Nancy, what would we Crackpots do without you to get us organized so that we can have fun being Crackpotty?
Like a properly flexible Crackpot, I have no strong preferences, but here are my comments. I think I like Snowball Nine Patch the best but I agree that it might require more planning than Crackpots can usually manage. Friendship Star certainly looks easy and flexible. I think Spinner looks a bit busy and would also probably require more coordination than we can usually manage to produce a top that doesn’t look totally random. I looked up Batik Scramble in Quiltmaker and and think your Rainbow Scramble variant would be cool. I didn’t like Double 4 Patch on Point until I looked a the photo of the whole top. That looks cool but also probably requires some coordination. I think a 9 patch on point would be a bit boring, unless we can come up with a clever arrangement of fabrics, which would take some coordination.
I guess my vote would be for Nancy to make a decision and then tell us all what to bring from our stashes. 🙂
I’m another properly flexible Crackpot, so I’m flexible. My observation of previous years is that we don’t get off to an extremely early start. Plus there seems to be a certain need to spend some time chatting, which cuts into the sewing time. So perhaps nothing too complex.