Brick Road

Meow! Meow meow meow! Pudding was very, very comfortable on the Faded Memories quilt.

I had In The Pink on my bed for a while in the winter, but she never warmed up to it. The minute I put Faded Memories on, though, love! Poor little kittens who have lost their mittens, perhaps? Or Kitty Cucumber? Nothing was cuter than Pudding on that quilt.

Or cuddler. Until now, perhaps. My parents are visiting this weekend, and my mother brought the quilted, bound, completed version of my Brick Road quilt top.

Here is a creamy, dreamy summer quilt to keep the chill off of those magical midsummer nights. It even has a scalloped edge.

Information redux: this is made of Moda’s Seaside Rose fabric. The block layout and dimensions are from a Kaffe Fassett book, but I just calculated the finished size of the blocks and made the quilt that size. Except, that then it turned out too short (because math is a conspiracy), so I sewed a strip of fabric across each end…

It shows when the scalloped edge is turned back. Eeeeeeee!!!

Pictures of Pudding on the quilt, as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

Come out of the garden, Maude

Phew. Let’s go indoors for a while. All of that sunshine is getting to be a bit much.

There are plenty of pretties to look at indoors, though. Last night, in one of what’s becoming a long run of sleepless nights, I found my ribbon box. Awwww. They’re all so cute! And just imagine all of the ridiculously adorable things that can be done with them–birthday presents tied up, kittens decorated, little girl’s dresses adorned, hand-knit sweater bindings reinforced. The possibilities are endless.

And then I found more ribbon,

And then I found more. These three are extra-wide and extra-special. I think these are appropriate only, really, for tying up birthday packages–don’t you think?

Also there has, mysteriously, come to be yet another pile of fabric in my craft room. Where CAN it have come from??? Such mysteries. This will be another quilt, though, possibly another queen-size quilt, possibly the Radio Flyer design from Miss Rosie’s Quilt Collection… or possibly something else entirely. I just don’t know yet. I only know that these fabrics are absolutely edible.

And I don’t feel guilty about these new mysterious pile of fabric, because sleepless nights mean that this…

Is turning into this.

Yipes!

Of red-ripe strawberries resting in her minty-blue colander, Alicia says “Yipes! Is that pretty!”

Yipes indeed. I do love strong, bright, clear colors and I do love summer fruit and I do love kitchen gadgets in novelty colors. A trifecta of adoration. Le sigh.

Yipes to the American Pie quilt, which is slowly taking shape. I have sewn one of the two corner accents onto each of the big squares. It’s good. It’s gonna get better. Stay tuned.

And yipes to Pudding Darling, who gave me the opportunity to take this perfect shot. An open window and lots of yarn; what can she possibly want for Christmas?

Cute/Sweet

In the whirl of social activity, it had somehow come to pass that I hadn’t looked at a single magazine yet this year. Six issues of Martha Stewart Living and six issues of Country Living were piled on my coffee table, touched by guests but not by myself. Something had to be Done.

There was a little blurb about Alicia Paulson of Posy Gets Cozy, congratulations Alicia! Your blog is, for sheer eye candy, my very favorite ever. I have been wandering around my house, trying to figure out why mine isn’t that cute.

Martha Stewart was once quoted as saying, “I don’t need eight houses. I want eight houses.” I feel that way sometimes, too. I would like to have a Craftsman-style bungalow. I would like to have an adorable Shabby Chic cottage. I would like an English Country house in Oxfordshire. I’d like a white tropical beauty on Key West, shaded by enormous palms and with the interior walls all painted dreamy pale blue. Alas, like most of us, I have to settle for just one home, and do one thing with it. And the English look seems to have won, for the most part, with some parts Country and some parts City. And I do love my house. I do.

In other news, one of the piles of fabric from yesterday has been reduced to 5.5″ squares. All of these will be put together into an American Pie quilt, finished size 50″ x 50″, a lap quilt, just right to throw over the pink wing chair in my bedroom. Totally English Country.

Gotcha!

While you weren’t looking, I finished a quilt top!

This quilt top is made of Moda’s Seaside Rose collection in the pink, green, and pearl colorways. It is a Brick Road pattern quilt, with bricks 4.5″ x 6″ cut, 4″ x 5.5″ sewn. It is 16.5 bricks long and 24 bricks wide… in theory, you can calculate what size quilt that should have made, but in practice the top is 91″ long and 94″ wide, before pressing.

I will probably put a wide-ish white-on-white border around it. It’s just a smidge small for a queen size bed as it is, and quilting makes things shrink a bit.

I will deliver it to my mother for quilting in June, when I visit them at their Perfect Cabin. The equipage of the Perfect Cabin was augmented by two kayaks today, so my father reports.

Pointy points

Things are looking up. Most of the points are pointy.

Thimbleberries and optimism

After yesterday’s disappointment with Flock of Triangles, I moped for about thirty seconds, then I rallied with an idea for another quilt, made out of Thimbleberries fabrics and involving triangles, but only in the easiest possible way, that I have handled before and am sure I can handle again. There are a lot of quilt shops in the vicinity, but only one with any sizeable amount of Thimbleberries–and she just happened to be in the store yesterday, so my mother and I braved the icy roads. There was fabric at the other end, you know, and a very friendly calico cat.

I spent yesterday cutting out a metric load of squares and today I am beginning to sew. I am full of optimism. Every single point in this quilt top is going to be… pointy.

These colors are traditional sorts of colors, I suppose because they resemble colors that can be achieved with natural dyestuffs. By the way–if you are ever at loose ends about what to do with ten minutes, read up on dyestuffs and pigments on Wikipedia. It’s wonderful. Anyway: my own house is full of light, clear colors, and these muddy ones don’t go at all. But I have always admired the effect of lots of these kinds of quilts piled together, and the way that the colors all go together no matter what, and anyway I’m steeped in Kim Diehl and Lynette Jensen books here, so I’m in the mood. Hooray!

Denyse Schmidt 1, Snapdragons 0

Well, Denyse Schmidt has won this round with me. After oh-so-carefully cutting out all those hundreds of 90-45-45 triangles for her Flock Of Triangles quilt, and oh-so-carefully sewing the first pairs together, sewing pairs of those pairs together has defeated me. I cannot get the edges to line up. Sewing together triangles, if you didn’t know, is sort of hard. And this quilt is all triangles, and there are no tricks or shortcuts to making it, so it’s not only sort of hard, it’s awfully fiddly. And I’m putting it aside for the time being, until I get the patience to take a half-square template to it, and trim up all the blocks. Grrrr.

So let’s look at this mini-quilt that my mother made, and that won first place at a quilt show. My mother is one of those gifted people who can measure something twice and get the same result both times. She can also cut straight, and, if you can believe it (and I can’t), sew seams that are consistently 1/4″ deep. So much talent, none of it inherited by me. Sigh.

And here is the guest room I am staying in. This house does not have my bedroom in it, of course, so I stay in the guest room. It is very comfortable, almost completely soundproof and it even has a television. It has six windows, too, amazingly. My mother made the quilts of course.

How Kat got her groove back

I am two months post-move, and I have finally gotten my groove back. I have been avoiding my sewing room because it is a wreck (actually, to use Alicia’s anti-euphemism, my sewing room blew chunks) and will stay that way apparently until December 3, which is the new shipping date for the shelves that will go there. Until then, it’s still a chaos of yarn and fabric, and it scares me.

Brave samurai chicks can’t afford to be scared by a little mess, though, so on Tuesday evenings I dug out my sewing machine, set it up, and hemmed my hakama. On Thursday evening, “hmm” says I, “now that my machine is set up, I really have no excuse to not work on the Flock of Triangles quilt, do I.”

“No, you don’t” I replied. So I sat down and started to sew.

Red and green summer quilt

I’ve been playing phone and e-mail tag with every gardener in the phone book for six weeks now. Yesterday I got the email I had been dreading–my gigantic order from Blue Stone Perennials has shipped, and I have no garden beds to put them into.

Fortunately, Fate intervened. I finally have a gardener, as of ten minutes ago, and he will dig the flower bed for me on Monday. Le sigh. Le grand relief! After arriving, the plants will probably need the weekend to recover anyway. I am prostrate from the strain of it all.

In general, things are suddenly streaming into my house. The tile floor, the prints, quilts, repairs, improvements, and the prospect of a dining area rug and new dining furniture in the near future, all are keeping me busy (and keeping my checking account very much in stasis!)

Thanks for all of the In The Pink love. I think I will fold it and put it on top of my chest of drawers until the weather turns properly cold. It is really a cold-weather kind of quilt, don’t you think? Then back to my pink and green Faded Memories while the warm weather lingers.

In The Pink wasn’t the only quilt my mother brought, finished, this weekend. Back in June (or was it July?) I finished the red and green “Summer Quilt” top, made out of calicoes from JoAnn’s. Here it is, all grown up:

It covers the top of a queen bed, but doesn’t hang off the edges. It is just a nice, experimental lap quilt.

My mother quilted it with feathers, which is her favorite kind of design. She does them freehand on her Gammill.

And bound it in delicious brilliant red. Tomatoes–strawberries–cherries. This quilt is a memory of the early summer, when saturated calico was the closest I could get to them.

In The Pink, in place

My parents were here this weekend, for the Inaugural Visit. It went well, though my dad spent most of the time in the crawlspace. He likes doing stuff like that, it seems.

My mother brought me the In The Pink quilt. I am now torn between it and the Faded Memories one that I have had on my bed till now. I had thought it would be so easy to have two quilts, and love them both the same, but it has been a trauma to deal with both. Perhaps this means I should not have more than one child…?

It looks lovely with the Tranquil Retreat afghan. Very warm and toasty, don’t you think?

I love how the afghan is so clean and creamy, and the quilt is so toasty and warm, and they both bring out the best in each other.

Another shot of the starry quilting to match the starry fabrics, in case you had forgotten.

Something new, in the yummy brown and pink plaid binding. Perfetto.

In The Pink

Oops, we did it again. My mother has quilted the top that I made from “In The Pink” fabric, designed by Robert Glass for Buggy Barn.

Do I really need to go on about this collection of fabric? I mean, you can see that it is pink–my favorite color–along with wonderful shades of brown and cream and gold, exactly the colors of coffee, chocolate, tea, cinnamon, honey, cocoa, and sugar. You see the little star prints–you see that they make the whole thing sparkle like cinnamon toast, or like fairy dust. You see the homespun plaids, all cozy and primitive and charming and country. You see, you see, you see. No. I don’t need to go on about why it’s so wonderful.

I pieced this quilt top in 48 hours earlier this summer, when I was visiting my parents at their little fishing cabin. That was a very busy visit–we looked at four other cabins and they placed an offer on the biggest and most comfortable. The little cabin then went on the market and sold one day later. They now live in the new, big, comfortable cabin full-time. I took advantage of their preoccupation by working on this quilt top nonstop until it was finished.

The quilting is not so wonderful as on previous quilts I’ve shown, because I interfered with my mother. I asked for medium-loft batting (hence the puffiness), and for a pantograph with stars in it (hence the goofy pattern). I have solemnly sworn to always let my mother have free reign with my quilt tops, from this point on. Hmmm. These pictures are my mother’s, by the way. The quilt is up in the sticks with her, still, and she will bring it to me on Labor Day.

The backing is a gigaaaaaaaaaaantic stretch of cinnamon toast… maybe the biggest piece of cinnamon toast ever. The binding is going to be dark chocolate plaid, shot with pink. Happy squeaks just thinking about it.

The guest bed

It was a ten-hour quest, but at last I triumphed! I found my iron and my ironing board, which made it worthwhile to iron the guest bed’s bedskirt, put it on, and make the whole thing up. Oh! How much better I feel about the house, now that I can see this:

The quilt will be recognized by veteran readers (ha!) as the Maison de Noel quilt, pieced by me from a Kaffe Fasset pattern out of Moda’s Maison de Noel fabric, and quilted by my mother on her Gammill. The bedframe is the white Claudia from Pottery Barn. I first saw this bedframe in their catalogue three, maybe four Christmases ago, and just loved it then. I’ve just loved it ever since, and now, it’s mine. It was totally worth the wait, and do you know what’s really cool about it? Those glass knobs are on standard doorknob screws, so I can swap out any doorknobs I want. Not that I will, yet, but I could.

The throw pillows were also blogged here earlier this summer. They are “meh.” They look much better on the bed than they do on their own, I’ll tell you. The ruffly white sheets are Simply Shabby Chic from Target. Love ‘em. Adorable. Love ‘em.

Now tell me, and don’t be shy… who wants to spend the night at my house?

Marcus Brothers Madness

Well, I don’t have my camera, but I do have my scanner. So here are my new quandaries:

Bleeker Street by Marcus Brothers

Metro Blue by Marcus Brothers

These aren’t the kinds of colors that go with my house or my decorating, but they’re beautiful and I thought that the fat quarters packs would make good stashbuilders. I’m so full-up of quilting commitments that I’d like to sew something with these–but what? What comes to my mind are lots of little somethings, like book covers or handkerchief sachets. I definitely don’t need any more of either, though, and they just didn’t sell on Etsy. So what? An infinite number of lavender sachets, or pincushions? Please chime in! I need help!

Maison de Noel

Ohhhhh my. My mother has worked her magic. My Maison de Noel quilt top has been transformed into a real quilt, and it’s sooooo lovely.

I’ll never get over the transformation from warped, buckling, raveling, maddening quilt top into snuggly, sophisticated, totally-with-it quilt.

And my mother’s getting pretty good with her Gammill.

This top was pieced from a Kaffe Fassett pattern, though I think–I think, because it’s too late at night to go flipping through the books looking for it–that I made this quilt bigger than the original pattern specified. It will fit a queen bed generously. This is for the guest bedroom, with the cushion covers I posted yesterday. And the white iron bedstead, with cut glass finials. Soooooooooo perfect. I just love it.

Belle e’ finite!

Is that proper Italian? One gets all of the contractions confused. Anyway, she is finished and she is beautiful!

The red and green summer quilt, my friends. It is 68×84, and has four big white blocks by five big white blocks, with hourglass sashing in between and as a border all around. It is made of calico I bought at JoAnn’s (not elegant, but darlings, it’s still so pretty!)

This quilt was a trial for me. I had the best intentions of sewing accurately and neatly, I really did, but what can I say? I live in a universe where two and two do not reliably add up to four. After accurately cutting the pieces, I sewed them together and discovered that the bias seams had skewed them… so I cut them all down to 4.5″ squares using an Omnigrid, and lo, they still did not all fit together. I am taking this as a lesson in the happy entropy of the universe, and looking at the quilt only from afar, where all the points seem soooo… deliciously pointy.

Tomatoes and strawberries and red, red cherries. Or, if you prefer, Christmas candy, ribbon candy and millefiore candy and all the rest. Delicious. This is meant as a “foot quilt” for the guest bedroom in my new house–to throw across the bottom of the queen bed on those nights when your tootsies need warming but the rest of you doesn’t.

I will deliver it to my mother (who does machine quilting) at Gavin’s birthday party this weekend. Hooray!