story of a quilt

Check out these beautiful blocks I received from The Crafty Scientist! And I'm not just saying that because I now have enough blocks to sew the top together - they are completely gorgeous!



We swapped because I wanted a little more pastel in my quilt - do you see the lavender she put in there? Brilliant! I never would have thought to add that color, but it just works. It works like crazy.

Thanks, Dayna! I can't wait to show how the whole thing comes together!

I can't believe I haven't updated in over a month! Well... maybe I can. It's been pretty eventful around here lately, and some of that has to do with the block I'm showing here.

A few months ago, I signed up to contribute some products to the MTV Style Lounge.. You can read a little more about that here. When I was putting my masks together, I made the pieced mask from half of a block I was going to submit to the swap, but ended up being a little small. That mask is now owned by someone, possibly kind of a famous someone, who went to the Style Lounge, and that's just fun to think about.

The half of the block you can see above is now the middle of this block. I think I've mentioned that I have some mixed feelings about the "improvisational" aesthetic, but there is one thing I love about it, unequivocally: recycled blocks that don't look like recycled blocks.

There's something unbelievably satisfying about - and can you tell I LONG for season three of Project Runway? - making it work. We live in the age of fabric plenty, so there was no reason I needed to reuse this or any other block that fell short, whether in actual size or just not looking quite nice enough to send off to some anxious stranger who has every right to my best work. But I wanted to get this one right. And it's not my favorite block I've done, but I like it a lot. I like it so much, in fact, that I wish I'd thought to rework it in time to send it off to the swap.

Oh, well - lessoned learned, and now I have a block with kind of an interesting history.

Dayna, aka The Crafty Scientist contacted me about swapping EVEN more blocks. We're both in the predicament of wanting a bigger quilt than we've got the goods for (and of course, we have extra fabric from the first round of block construction) so I whipped up a couple of curry-heavy blocks in exchange for a couple of mint-heavy blocks.

We have both discovered that color balance is a real challenge when you're piecing together work from 9 different strangers. Who knew?



Looking at the pic, I'm kind of taken aback by how personal these are. I've been raiding my scrap pile to make my blocks, and every fabric I've used here, other than the solids, is left over from another quilt. The fabrics in the curry on the left (is it obnoxious that I want to refer to these like Indian food?) is made up of leftover bits of a quilt I made last year and haven't sold yet, and some binding from one of my eye quilts that is long gone. The curry on the right is made up of more bindings from eye quilts, plus scraps from these commissioned quilts that were only in my life for what seemed like seconds.

Fans of improvisational quilting will probably think it's bunk that curry #2 was pieced in just that style - but I can't help it if I have a more leftover straight-grain binding than the average crafter!

So these are packed up and ready to go, and won't make into my quilt, but into Dayna's. I can't wait to see what she does with them.

Yesterday I was on about the beauty of solid fabrics and seams, and, never being one to leave well enough alone, put this together:



I found the method at Quilter's Cache, which is a great site for free quilt blocks. This one is called Planned Patchhood, which totally cracks me up.

Of course, like everything else that strikes me as instantly charming, it didn't yield the right sized finished block, so I added a cute dotty border that also appears in a block I received in the swap.

When I first saw, in person, my laundered Kona cottons for my swap blocks, I decided I just HAD to try a log cabin.

Log cabin quilts never appealed to me much before, but that's because, in many of their incarnations, they are too darn busy for me. But one of the cool things about sewing solids is that you can really notice the beauty and craftsmanship in a seam.

I know, I know. You pretty much have to be the ultimate quilting nerd to fetishize the SEAM the way I do, but and intricately pieced block all in one or two solid fabrics just gets right down to the point: cutting the fabric and sewing it back up just makes it better. It may sound like an exercise in futility, but if you look at a log cabin block, you know that's not true. Materials + time + effort + know-how = craft. It all adds up.

So a two-tone log cabin seemed perfect, especially since I wasn't loving the squash and curry fabrics in and of themselves, but I did like the way they contrasted with the mint and robin's egg cottons.

So I eagerly got to it, and here's what I made:



Pretty, isn't it? Too bad my know-how is a bit lacking on the math front, and it didn't add up to 10.5 inches. I set it aside, disappointed, but reasonably sure it would make a nice potholder or something.

After receiving my final blocks, the dearth of mint led me to want to make a whole mess of new blocks of my own to add on. Unfortunately, I'd used up so much mint on the blocks I sent away, I wasn't sure how to make that happen, unless I really embraced the old, "use what you have" spirit. And since I was already doing that with the blocks I received, I decided to pull out my inadequate log cabin and add a funky half-border.



What's funny is that, initially, that's exactly what I didn't want to do. I mean, I could have saved the whole situation by adding that little border and tossing it into the out-going pile, but I just wasn't feeling it then. I didn't want to throw off the symmetry, or add another color or pattern. Now, though, I'm happier with the log cabin + paisley version than I was with the perfectly symmetrical log cabin. Go figure.

I've already linked to the Seedpod block swap, but since a little bird told me it was Jessica's birthday, I wanted to give her a shout-out for arranging the whole swap for us. She did a ton of work, including posting all these beautiful shots of various blocks, so you can see what kinds of submissions there were.

So, thanks again, Jessica, and Happy Birthday!

Today I received nine quilt blocks from a block swap I signed up for a few months ago. The rules were to make 10 blocks (1 for charity) using fabrics from your own stash combined with Kona cottons in some combination of four colors: squash, curry, mint, and robin's egg. Under the "links" section of this blog, you can find a link to the rest of the rules.

I participated in the swap thinking that when I got blocks from nine strangers, I'd turn them into a quilt, and that would be a done deal. However, when the blocks arrived, I was immediately fascinated with their history, and even more fascinated with their future.

I started this blog to investigate the past of each of these blocks, and to brainstorm ideas about what they might become.

People are always asking me about my quilts, and it's ironic that, as a writer, I'm not better at telling their stories. This is an effort to change all that.