Crackpot Quilters’ Blog

by Ann

And, yes, I know that green is missing. I washed all of the fabric for The Quilt, and only the green ran. So it was having an extra soak when this photo was taken. Actually it soaked in multiple changes of cold water for several days, including an overnight soak in salt water, and it is still running. Does anyone have any suggestions? Marty??  I can’t wait to start cutting and creating strip sets so I can start piecing, but obviously I have to solve the running problem first.

By Nancy

Here it is, the quilt I made for my German host sister, Helene, for her 40th birthday!

It’s based on Blue Baskets from the March/April ’05 issue of Quiltmaker.  I changed the flower blocks from baskets to tulips because I like tulips better. You can’t really tell in the picture, but the yellow nine patch blocks are made from 5 or 6 different yellow fabrics that I had in my stash.  I also used green, red, orange, and purple fabric from my stash for the tulips.  I wasn’t sure what color I was going to make the setting triangles until I had finished all of the blocks and had them laid out on the dining room table (I have a patient family – no one bats an eye at this anymore).  I decided that white setting triangles and solid yellow binding would look best.  The only fabric I bought for the quilt was more white tone-on-tone for the background, yellow for the binding, and more of the green for the backing.  Not bad, I think!  I was helped immensely in finishing the quilt in time for our trip by Marty and Ann, who played with the boys while I machine quilted and sewed binding like crazy.  Helene was surprised and very happy with her quilt!

By Ann

Crackpots with good memories will recall that many years ago, I began talking about making a quilt for Lou and me in black with ‘jewel tones,” i.e. primary colors, or as Marty put it, an Amish style quilt. Aside from buying lots of ROYGBIV fabrics, I have gone nowhere with the idea – until now. Suddenly, I think I may have a pattern. And here it is:

I got the idea from this quilt in the April, 2012 issue of Quilter’s World, which I don’t like at all.

But then there was this variant on the block, and something clicked.

It’s an interesting block – 11″ square – so each of those strips is 1″ wide and there are 5 1″ squares in each block. So I will have to work at perfecting my piecing accuracy. Quilter’s World ranks the quilt as for the “confident beginner.” I’m hoping that my confidence is not misplaced.

The next step was doing some simple math. I measured our bed and decided that my quilt should be 94″x97″. (That will probably be modified to make it a square.) That meant I would need 8×8 11″ blocks, but that didn’t leave much for borders, and I like interesting borders. Also, making 64 blocks did sound daunting. So I decided that 7×7 blocks would give me ample room for borders, and 49 blocks is significantly less than 64.

Next I drew 6 blocks on 1/4″ graph paper, filling in only the black background and leaving all the 1″ strips white. I colored in 2 of the blocks in a pattern that I thought would be interesting and immediately concluded that I really needed to be working with the full 7×7 array to get a good sense of what I was getting in terms of primary and secondary patterns with the different colors. So I took the 4 black and white blocks I had left and made multiple photocopies of them. These I taped together, being careful not to put any tape on the right side of the paper since I knew I wouldn’t be able to color over scotch tape. That in itself proved to be an interesting challenge. Then I realized that I might color in 70% or 80% of my 49 blocks and decide I didn’t like the pattern and have to start all over again. That would mean more cutting and taping and assembling, and that seemed like a possibility to be avoided, so I took my carefully taped 7×7 black and white pattern to Kinko’s and had 4 copies made. Then I started coloring. And the above pattern is what I came up with. I’m amazed by how much I like my first try. In fact, the more I see it, the more I like it. So I think this is the Quilt Pattern.

Then the fabric. Here is what I have acquired:

Yikes! When I bought them, I was trying for a dark and a light of each of the 6 primary colors. The purple variegated fabric was a bonus, and I  absolutely love it. The green variegated was part of the Lorene Lewis collection. I don’t like it nearly as much as the purple, but it may prove to be just the ticket for a border when the quilt is assembled. We shall keep an open mind. But now that I have a pattern, I don’t think I need a light and a dark of each color, so here is my pattern with what will probably be my final palette (except for the black, of course).

The next steps will be to compute how much yardage of each color I will need. I have a yard of each and am guessing that that will be enough. I’ll need more yellow and green than any of the other colors, and if I’m short of those, I’m sure I will be able to come up with a Plan B. Then I need to get a lot of black and start cutting an piecing and measuring and piecing and measuring until I can get those scant 1/4″  seams to be just right and consistent. Then I will want to put 4 or 9  blocks together to be sure I like the pattern as much in fabric as on paper. Maybe I’ll hold off on buying a lot of black until I’m sure. (-:

What would you do if you received an email message to members of your family that Niece was expecting identical twins?

Of course, that same day, you’d email the female members of your family asking if they wanted to join in a group quilt for the twins. Er, two group quilts.

But being a sensitive person, you’d title your message, “Read Niece’s Message First.” You’d want the good news to come from Niece, but you would be so excited that you’d want the plotting and scheming to begin right away. So that is what I did.

Since we were all busy with Thanksgiving and Christmas preparations, we decided to delay active production until after the holidays. By then we’d probably know the gender of the babies and we could choose fabric to suit them. And at Christmas, three of the five of the family plotters and schemers would be able to shop for fabric together.

During our Christmas holiday together time, three of us picked out quilt fabric. We chose a floral print in two colorways–yellow and orange. These would be our focus fabrics. Then we picked out some blue, red, yellow and white to go with it. The green was added a bit later. We laundered, pressed, and cut our fabric so each of our five participants would have plenty of fabric to choose from. The fabric was then sent on to the participants.

Our only plan was to have two sampler quilts with 12 nine-inch blocks. Each participant could choose her own blocks and colors, as long as the yellow focus fabric was in all the blocks for one quilt and the orange focus fabric was in all the blocks for the other quilt. Many of us used Block Party by Marsha McCloskey as our reference book. We’ve used it before, and it works well for group quilts.

I was the only experienced quilter with no real job so I volunteered to assemble and quilt the quilts. The quilts were finished in late April, a couple of weeks after the girls were born.

If you look at the quilts, you will see that some of us made the same block twice in different colorways, and others of us made entirely different blocks for each quilt. That’s one of the things that makes this sort of project fun. These are the sixth and seventh quilts that various groups of family members have made for this generation.

The quilts were delivered in early June to the adorable babies and their tired, but amazing, parents. One great-aunt got to hold them both at the same time.

by Cathy

In a fit of spontaneous genius, last week I put in for a vacation day today for no apparent reason (other than it’s been a really grueling semester for both Chris and me and we’re plum worn out, and James’s preschool is still in session). So of course I had to play with fabric!

First, I pre-washed a bunch of fabric that I’ve had hanging around for a long time — some of it maybe since last summer’s trip to The Fabric Store!  It dried in about 5 minutes on the clothesline, which was just fine.

Then I got some work done on a project I’ve been dabbling around with for a while:

It’s a string quilt, made from scraps from nearly every quilting project I’ve ever worked on!  I’m very excited about it, because there are bits and pieces of all kinds of wonderful things in there, and because it’s all scraps: even the muslin that the pieces are sewn onto!  I’ve been saving these “too small for much of anything” scraps for a long time, and finally working them into a quilt has been really fun.

At first I planned to sew the “strings” to each other directly, as the old quilts would have done, but now I’m thinking I might put sashing between each of the pieces, mostly because with all the seams, and the muslin backing, the strings are pretty thick and inflexible, and sewing them directly to each other would be pretty bulky and bumpy.   I’m about to sit down and sort though all my scraps and see if I can find an appropriate dark solid to use as sashing.

Last night I went out to dinner with friends and was able to present them with the completed quilt for their second son, who is 5 weeks old today. This might be a record in terms of quilt completion time after birth – at least for me. The pattern is pretty basic, but I like letting the animal print be the focus – after all, I did a bunch of fussy-cutting for those squares!

And here’s a detail picture with a better look at the focus fabric. Note that the solids are more crinkly post-quilt-washing than the focus fabric. This is likely due to the fact that I forgot to pre-wash the animal fabric so it shrank along with the batting (my usual cotton+rayon from bamboo) when I washed the completed quilt.

The backing is a brown plaid flannel.

The Crackpots who were consulted for advice on Big Brother gifts should know that the wheel-featuring present (a couple Little People cars) was appreciated by Adam. I can also report that baby Kyle is adorable.