quilt

I’ve been looking for a reason to use the Chopsticks design for some time, and am finally making the time to try it out here. The original pattern shows this design in neutrals, so my version differs mightily from the original. I’m following Alex’s color request: the colors of the German flag.

I threw in orange for good measure. If I’m going to have yellow, red, and black — why not slide in orange, too?

Yes, I know they look like fluorescent traffic signs.

I’ve even slid in a bit of the Australian fabric that esmerel found:

No new fabrics for this quilt; I raided the reds that Jake sent me, plus my stash — I had enough of these strong colors to make it work.

Lily is a short-timer. I started learning a new sewing skill (English paper piecing) without a clear project in mind, and decided I’d figure it out as I went along. I took a bag of little paper hexagons with me to my vacation in Minnesota, figuring I’d do a few flowers.

I did a LOT of flowers. It turned out to be incredibly easy, and very portable. My friends’ kids wanted to watch TV? Sit down and sew a couple of flowers. In the middle seat on the last plane home? Sew flowers. It worked out well.

Sometimes, sweetness strikes you when you least expect it. As most of you undoubtedly know by now, I held a quilt contest; the person who had the closest guess to Jeff’s raw hospital bill at UAB won a quilt. Susanna, a co-worker of mine, won it by guessing $550,000, getting her just a little over $7K away from the true number.

I fully expected to be constructing a new quilt for her, but she asked if she could have an antique, instead. She said that she’d never gotten a quilt when she married, and that her tenth anniversary was coming up this summer, so why not make it a real antique? She loved Depression-era quilts, and quickly settled on a Depression-era double wedding ring quilt, preferably with feedsack fabrics.

Read the rest »

Stargirl is a thank-you quilt, for a set of events I haven’t been able to bring myself to write about publicly. The severity of Jeff’s accident is known to nearly everyone at this point, I think, and I don’t have to belabor the point. He is injured, gravely injured, and whatever recovery he is able to make will take a long time.

Jeff had always wanted Crystal and me to become friends. He picked a crappy way to do it, but he did make it happen.

Crystal and Jeff are closer friends than most people realize. She beat me to the hospital on the night we finally learned that Jeff was in UAB, and left his side as little as possible until he was transferred to Huntsville. She’s one of the few people that Jeff would consistently respond positively to, early on, and since he’s become conscious again she is someone he asks for, and clearly trusts.

I can step away from Jeff if she’s there, because if she is, Jeff’s in good hands. He knows it. She knows it. I know it.

For those of you who are my seven regular readers of domesticat.net, this post isn't for you; this post is a rehash of some previous posts, plus photos, for the Quilt Bloggers' Festival. It's for a lot of people who didn't see this little quilt while it was in progress.

I'd like to introduce you to a pattern that is almost never seen in quilting. It's so similar to what you're accustomed to that it'll take you a moment or two to recognize that something about this pattern is off, and different:

['Finality']

Another rescue quilt top! Most of the quilt tops I see on ebay don’t interest me that much. Most of the ones I can afford are one of these:

• standard-country-quilts
• cheap-and-disintegrating
• beautifully made and priced accordingly

Every now and then, you get lucky; Primrose was grossly mislabeled and available for a beautiful price as a result. This quilt falls into another category altogether: damaged but salvageable.

[‘Chomped: the before shot’]

Someone took scissors to the bottom of this quilt. I want to hope that it was done because something happened to it, but I think it unlikely; most of the cutting was done on diamonds of a particular color, so I think someone cut into it for crafting purposes.  (To which I say, why why why?)

From the listing: