A Little Interstitial Music: A Miscellany

...being not one thing or another, and certainly not the things they probably could have been.

Continuing my inability to focus on Things I Said I Would Do, being distracted by Things That Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time, here are a couple of quilty things that happened lately instead of things I've told some folks I would do for them.  I mean, I will.  Soon. Meanwhile....

First, a baby blanket for the cousin of a friend - kind of an odd color palate, but she gave me free rein on pattern and color, and I had been noodling with some orange-yellow-green-purple bits and bobs I had sitting around.  At her wise suggestion I swapped purple for blue and in the final analysis, it's a cheery, bright, non-gender specific lil Broken Windows strip on a mottled Grunge white, with a cozy gray windowpane flannel on back + a strip of yellow 40s juvenile print flannel I inherited from the Estate of the Unknown Benefactress.

Then there's this: a scrappy low-volume Rail Fence quilt with bonus Scrappy Rainbow Pinwheels - a super easy quilt for beginners, if you have a ton of semi-neutrals lying around and some bright squares.












This has still not quite used up all those shirt scraps that made Chris and JJ's Trip Around the World quilt and also appeared in the Cap'n's Low volume Postage Stamps, lo these many years past.  In fact, it was probably some of the first fabric in my stash, when I started a sewing class 7 years ago this fall.  (Seven years! That's kind of nutty. I was thinking 2015 but, no, per this very blog, it was 2012. Yowza.) Below, you can see I used the blue-er shirts more centrally and as I got out to the edges it was more whites and grey-er ones. This has very little to do with a grand strategy and everything to do with that being how it got laid down on the Design Floor the first time around.

Continuing a proud tradition of not having enough backing width by mere inches.

Anyhoo, these are 2.5" x 6.5" strips with the 2.5" color squares sewn in diagonally - though, trickily, since the blades of the pinwheel need to be free to spin, you can't strip piece these because the colors are on the inside, not the outside, of the block, so you cut out all of the 6.5" lengths, add the colors, and then sew the Rail Fences together.  It's great mindless sewing for summer baseball game "watching."  (Go Cubs!)

This quilting was a BIG DAMN DEAL for me - my first entirely free-motion machine quilted quilt, instead of just select easy-to-reach areas.  I did wavy lines in the direction of the rails which, as it turns out, may have been kind of wasted effort and I could have just done it as an all-over pattern, because you can't really see how the wiggles change from Fence to Fence unless you're looking for it.  But it was exciting to finish and I'm MUCH more comfortable with freehand wavy lines. I started with closer lines, almost a wood grain texture but soon discovered that was going to take me an ice age to finish, so loosened up a bit. That results in a nicer drape to the quilt anyway, IMO. 

Also, the binding: rainbow ombre! I dig how it looks, especially on the gray/black back.  Cheery!  Except maybe for the gray binding strip (centered on at one side - I just hadn't prepped enough of the rainbow stuff for binding and didn't care to go back and cut one more strip of it, when I had the gray binding already made for some previous project.  Because I'm lazy. Or thrifty. Or whatever, it didn't happen.

 Then there's this odd raspberry cotton-candy colored confection which is just a basic Coin quilt (also called "Chinese Coin", "Roman Coin", and "Bar Quilt" - mine's more of a Bar, since I think coins are supposed to be narrower columns, and sometimes also different heights).  (Why do people pronounce that "heighths"? I never understood that.) (Of course mine WOULD be a "Bar Quilt.")

But the color scheme has been in my brain a lot lately - this pink-yellow-orange-purple series.  Not sure why. Missing sunsets? Strong yen for sherbet?  Trying to rekindle a childhood love of FruitStripe Gum? Maybe being in Houston this long has made me a secret Astros fan, but in 1983?

Colors a little more true in the sunlight (if wrinkly)

The only thing I could think to use for sashing (since I am quite bored with white and gray, for a change) was this very light blue, which is a linen texture from Henley Studio, which *kind of* sets it off perfectly and *kind of* makes it look like the colors ran in the wash, which they haven't (yet. But I guess now it doesn't matter if they do.)

Finally, there's this unfortunate top, which probably needs several borders to make it a usable size.... except that it is wildly out of true, with these rows of wee 2" squares finishing up pretty dramatically different lengths, despite having the same count... uh, woops.

At upper left, we find.... wait, WTF?

So because this is not critical, it has been summarily wadded up and thrown in a corner until I have energy to fix it or take it apart for reconstituting some other way.  Bleh.

Looks better when you can't see the corner in question.

These will likely be donated at some point - but first, I have to get them back to Illinois, because I will shortly be ending my stint at this gig in TX and heading off for ... somewhere else, tbd.  And every time I move hotels/airbnbs/ accounts, I gotta pack up whatever giant mounds of fabric have accumulated in my pro tempore Sewing Studio, and shove it all into my teeny Mazda for schlepping to the next port of call. 





You'd think this constant upheaval would make me more conservative when I buy fabric in a temporary location, and force me to Kon Marie the crap outta my traveling selections, but.... then you'd remember who you were talking about, and you'd laugh and laugh.

In my defense, there are some GREAT fabtic stores around here.

In conclusion:  I might not be doing what I've told myself sternly to do, but at least I'm sewing, and mental-health-wise, that's better than not sewing and waiting for The Right Inspiration to hit.  I mean, these piles of fabric are not going to cut themselves into smaller pieces and sew themselves back together.  Right? Right!  Back to work!  Except maybe I'll just take a bath for a bit, and check out Pinterest, in case there's anything VERY CRITICAL that I must make RIGHT AWAY.

Linking up with Confessions of a Fabric Addict for Whoop it Up Friday ... er, Saturday.