Saturday, January 7, 2012

Shower Epiphany

I always get the most amazing ideas in the shower.  It must be the timing of when the subliminal stuff from my dreams hits the morning caffeine.  Friday morning I solved 3 quilting dilemmas at once.

I had designed a fall themed quilt for my friend Carol.

The idea was to make the gold, orange and red as long strips of crazy patch with solid greens between.

I had finished about 30 inches worth of crazy patch before I decided that I wasn't loving the idea.

Last night I drew out the design that popped into my head in the shower,  and today started cutting out fabrics.  The idea is to make the stripes in smaller sections (typically 8-12 x 12-16 inches) and use those blocks for my FMQ Challenge blocks (project solution 1). I need more than 12 since I also want to try Trapunto this year and I want to try some designs to use on my Ojibwe Beadwork Inspired quilt which is waiting for me to become good at FMQ before I attempt to quilt it (project solution 2).

 By lunch time I had managed to cut out all the gold and yellow sections that will go into the quilt.  After I got those sections cut to size, I had enough yellow fabric to use on those stripes on the back of the quilt too.   I had another idea for the extra fabric....

...but first, I needed to finish 2 sections of yellow crazy 8x24, which I accomplished by early afternoon.

Meanwhile, I've been admiring string quilts on line.  And I absolutely loved the yellow zig-zag quilt that I made for my sister-in-law.  So all that gold fabric I had left over seemed a perfect candidate for a yellow & white string quilt.  Plus I could do a quilt-as-you-go method AND use up the bin of poly batting that I just found in the garage (project 3...maybe 4 & 5 too if using up terrible batting counts as a project as does learning an new QAYG technique).   I found a great QAYG technique tutorial at Welsh Quilter that I will use for both the string and the FMQ project.

Technically, these projects also solve quilting dillema 4 (or is that 6?), which was that I bought the green, red and gold fabric originally to do a Baltimore Album Quilt.  I've been collecting fabric for that quilt for so long though, that I'm now disappointed in the quality of many of the fabrics I collected.  This can be my excuse for only making pillows rather than a full Baltimore Album quilt.

I need to get all that done, because I've been taunting my brother Rick that since he was retired, he could send me a bunch of his old and/or ugly silk ties.  They arrived this week.  These are the ones that I think I can manage to play nicely together.

I'm still deciding on a pattern.  I'm planning to stabilize with a lightweight fuseable.  I'm psyching up to pre-wash so it won't have to eternally be dry cleaned.


OK...back to the sewing machine.  No, wait, football and hand quilting.

3 comments:

Julie Fukuda said...

Looks like there is enough going on to keep you out of trouble for some time!

Unknown said...

Heck you are way better organised than me.
I'm still dithering over what block is possible for the Free Bee month in April, inspiration is pulling me every which way

Annemart Berendse said...

Please prewash? Please? You've seen my tulip tiles! Love your applique btw!