National Quilting Day Results

Honestly, this doesn't look like much progress on my chosen project for National Quilting Day, but in fact, this is more quilting activity than I've done in months. If you heard any strains of hallelujah, it was probably my machine being so happy to be turned on and running. Most of my time was spent finding fabric and cutting it up in preparation for some sewing. Egads - half square triangles! Do I even know how to do that anymore? And where is that nifty tool that draws the diagonal sewing lines across the paired squares? I couldn't find it anywhere and had to revert to just drawing a single line from corner to corner. I even had a moment when I wasn't sure which button to push to set the machine for quarter inch sewing. I was pretty pleased with myself to get that little stack of half-square triangle units sewed, pressed and trimmed to size.

Sample blocks and patterns from a long ago class I taught

I wasn't flying totally blind though. I pulled out a file from my teaching days where I had stowed sample blocks and a pattern. My late friend Judi had worked up these two versions of this split nine-patch block and I made them up for samples for her hand-dyed fabric booth. We didn't have a lot of success in selling the patterns but I think the sample quilts sold a lot of fabric. As you can see, I worked up both a scrappy traditional fabric block and a more subtle contemporary version in batiks. I had the file at hand because I've been intending to make enough of those batik blocks to use as background for a tree silhouetted against a moon art quilt. I'd just been digging around in my blue batiks to make that book cloth so I thought that was the version I'd be working on. But I decided it needed more care in selection and placement of fabrics than the traditional scrappy one, so those are the kind of fabrics I dug out of my stash.

 

With soothing jazz music in the background and the hum of the machine, I spent the afternoon in a small bit of paradise, being reminded how much I enjoy working on this type of project.