2-4-16 Patches - Pattern Chosen

I went back to my original pattern choice to use up some of the 2, 4 and 16 patches I've been making as leaders n' enders - Sunny Lanes.  I have a couple of patterns by that name ripped out of magazines, so I must like the look. There is a free pattern at Quilt Blocks Galore.  I've linked directly to the pattern page here.  The patches I'm using are completely and randomly scrappy, built from 2" strips / scraps given to me by numerous quilters.  I pulled out some of my brights (yellows and oranges) but thought it was a little too bright and I didn't have enough yardage of the yellow I would have chosen.  So I decided to go with some brown and blue for the sashing corners.  Each block will be 12.5" unfinished, laid out like this pic (which will form blue stars and brown squares).

Or like this one (which will form brown stars and blue squares).

Now I just have to decide if I want the stars to be brown or blue.  I made enough sashing to complete four blocks and laid it out on the design wall so that the blues formed a square and the browns formed stars.

Then I switched it all around to see if I liked it better with blue stars and brown squares.

I had pretty much decided on brown stars until I looked at the pics.  Now I'm thinking blue stars.  This pattern is going to produce over three hundred new 2.5" Half Square Triangles because I'm a fan of double-sewing my sew n' flip corners to create bonus HSTs.  I've learned my lesson about tossing them into a bag or box for future trimming though, after finding the box with over 1,000 HSTs during my stash reorganization.  I originally blogged about those here.  (I'm still trimming those little suckers up in batches of 30 a day and may finally be done in another couple of weeks.)  As I make the sashing for my Sunny Lanes blocks, I will be trimming the bonus HSTs as I go.

I cut all the strips and squares today and will start drawing sewing lines on the remainder of the brown and blue squares while watching television.  A double bed sized quilt will only use half of the 4 and 16 patches in my stash, and I have a few more patterns I've found that I'm looking forward to making with the remainder.  After all the low-key brown and blue, I may go wild and bright in the next one.

Catching my breath... and slowing down

I made two new blocks for my Traditional Tuesday Sampler.  I am so glad I did that, and not just because of my perfectionist tendencies.  Using five browns and five pinks adds a textural quality to the log cabin blocks that was missing in my first attempts.  And I made sure to square the blocks after each go-round.  Click on the pics to enlarge them for a better view of the fabrics.  I used a couple of faves in them.  The brown with the criss-cross pattern?  That's a fabric from a Basic Grey collection, I bought in a layer cake pre-cut.  I loved that fabric so much, I went back and bought yardage. The other is the outside row of pink - it reminds me of fresh berries for some reason - it's a Thimbleberries tonal.

All my blocks to date.  Don't they look great?

On the radio today they mentioned the s-word.  Snow.  Not that they are forcasting snow - they're forcasting rain, but it is going to be so cold that the rain might just come down in flake form.  I know it's inevitable and it's even overdue (and it won't stay on the ground this time), but it felt like the proverbial second shoe dropping to the floor.  The almost manic and mysterious sense of speed that has been driving me for weeks now came to a screeching halt.

I think the rush to do a million things is a left-over from growing up on a farm.  September brought that sense of hurry to get everything done or lose it all.  Harvesting grain and picking up all the vegetables for canning from the family garden before the first hard frost - we none of us had time to rest much at this time of year.  It is so ingrained that I don't notice I'm doing it until it snows and then I stop and take a big breath.  So now I'm slowing down a little, forcing myself to slow down just a tiny bit, and breathe.

Now I know why I've been making so many strange mistakes these days. What's the old saying - haste makes waste.  I discovered that the two fabrics I pulled from the fling-it bag because I thought they were cotton... were in fact not cotton... which is likely why they were in the fling-it bag to begin with.  All it took was a hot iron to figure that out again - the unmistakable scent of polyester is still in my nose an hour later - yuck.  Back into the fling-it bag.

I dug out my box of four patches and sixteen patches, then sat down to leisurely think about what quilt patterns I would like to use them in.

And I'm going to put some time in hand stitching binding, again in a leisurely manner.

A bit of Sunday Sewing

Today is the first day of the Canton Village Bloggers' Block of the Month  - I'm going to make mine in scrappy blues and neutrals.  There seems to be quite a good supply of those fabrics in all of my strip bins, as well as yardage in my stash.  All the block # 1 components could be made from 2.5" strips and squares.  I'm keeping all the pertinent links for this project on a Blog Page here.

After finding a handful of colourful 9 patches in my 2.5" strip bin, I decided to keep making them so I could use them as the centres of Sister's Choice blocks - it will be a very colourful and scrappy project.  I'll be making these along with my Bloggers' BOM blocks every month.  The Sister's Choice blocks will finish at 10" square so I will probably want to make the quilt 6 by 8 (48 blocks).  I already have 19 nine-patches so only need another 29 before I move on to the next phase of these blocks.

I like the fast piecing method I read about on Quiltville - where to make a scrappy 9 patch you pull two strips plus a square from your strip bin.  As these are being made from 2.5" strips, I needed to cut two 10" strips in contrasting colours plus a 2.5" square of one of the colours.

After sewing the two strips together, and ironing, the strips are then subcut into 2.5" segments.

Then laid out for chain piecing.

 I made another two blocks for my Traditional Tuesday Sampler (blog page on that project is here).  I did determine that my seam allowance was a couple of threads off, but increased the components by 1/8" anyway.  There wasn't much to trim off to make the blocks 6.5" square.

Here's the pile of scrappy 4 patches that were run through as leaders n' enders during today's sewing.  I've found a couple of patterns I like that will use up some 4patches.  One requires 3.5" HSTs and the other 3.5" strips with sew n' flip corners.  Both ideas require some cutting to proceed, which I hope to have done before I run out of leader n' ender two-patches.

I'm making seriously good progress on the 2.5" HSTs I've been trimming.  Here's a pic of the trimmed box.  Amazing how fast it goes, even if only trimming 20 or 30 a day.

And this is all that is left in the "untrimmed" box.  I am on track to be done with this trimming business before the end of October.  I've found a couple of patterns that use a lot of HSTs.  They too require cutting components.

I can see I will have quite a bit of fabric cutting to do to use up some of these components.  Tonight?  I'm planning on handstitching binding and watching television.

The 9patch from .... (a hot place where they don't play hockey)

It's supposed to be simple!  Take a nine patch, sash it with muslin, attach it to another sashed nine patch and... you get the picture.  I've made far more intricate and complicated quilt blocks and tops with no trouble at all.  My sunflower quilt for example, each block had more than 100 pieces of fabric.  It went together without a single hitch.  What's the problem?

There!  That's the problem.  I finished sewing on the next row of blocks and in ironing and flipping the row, discovered that two blocks containing the same fabrics are side by side.  Arrrggghhhhh!  Now I know that random does not necessarily mean of equal distance from each other, but my only rule has been not to have two 9 patches containing the same fabric next to each other.  I spent quite a bit of time making sure of that with my strips.  But when I unsewed the strips, I must have switched some blocks around somewhere.  You have no idea how traumatic this discovery was.  It's as if the quilt top doesn't want to be made.  Then I noticed these two.

Now granted, they aren't exactly the same block.  After much muttering and considering of options, I decided not to worry about it.  That's right!  I'm going to leave it just the way it is.  This is a huge step for a perfectionist like me.  But in considering all the options I decided I could live with it just the way it is.  If I was intending to give this to someone, or enter it in a festival, I'd be busy ripping out that entire strip of blocks and saying some very rude words while I did so.  But, it's for me and it's scrappy and (let's face it) I've just about had it with this project.  It's certainly not an award winner and it has some strange fabric in it, like the axe-murderer block.  Take a look at the headless chickens and the blood red blocks.  Now if I'm not going to worry about this block, surely having two same fabric blocks next to each other should be no worry at all.

Another problem?  I've run out of leader and ender project.  The box by the sewing machine is now empty.

I finished sewing strip sets of the 1.5" x 6" strips that were in the box with the 9 patches.  Eeewww! There are some really hideous fabrics in here.  I'll be glad to see the last of these.

I ended up with 24 strips (5" x 18") and a about 12 (3" x 12").  I'm still thinking of using them in the String-X or Diamond Strings patterns at Quiltville but I might want them for borders on the 9 patch or the Ohio Star (both made with many of these fabrics).  And I certainly don't want to stop wrestling with the 9patch quilt top to start making blocks with the strip sets.  That would be the chicken's way out... or the headless chicken's way out.

I have to have a leader and ender project.  If I don't, the threads get all tangled and create ugly stump work on the back of what I'm sewing.

So I opened that box full of two-sies and started feeding them through my machine to make four-patches.  I originally blogged about them here.

Which means that overflowing box of four patches and sixteen patches is going to hit critical mass and explode soon.

Am I the only one who has these problems?  Thank goodness tomorrow is Crumb-Along Tuesday and I can work on something other than the possessed 9 patch.

 

Peeking - Box # 9

Box # 9 is really a box-and-a-half.  First the half box.  Ta-dah!  It's filled with scrappy two-sies, that is to say scrappy two patches.  These were all sewn as Leader n' Ender as I stitched away on other projects and blocks.

The bigger box contains, scrappy 4-patches (3.5" unfinished) made by sewing together the two-sies, and scrappy 16-patches (6.5" unfinished) made from combining four 4-patches.  Ummm... the box is 4" deep and it's full to overflowing.  I think there's enough here to make two full size quilts, at least.  I wasn't paying attention to how they were piling up.... this is what happens when you are completely distracted.

The problem is, I don't remember what quilt pattern I had in mind when I started sewing these darn things.  I'm going on the assumption that I originally had a plan - this makes me feel better about the whole obsessive sewing with a distracted mind thing.  So I've been auditioning quilt patterns to use these up.  Here's some that I found appealing.

Buckeye Beauty

Jacob's Ladder

Sunny Lanes

or I could alternate the 16-patch blocks with snowballs, creating that star point effect...  but all these ideas require either sewing another batch of components (not that I'm necessarily opposed to that idea) or creating even more bonus HSTs.  I'm steadily working on trimming up that box of over 1,000 HSTs as it is.

I'm leaning towards Scrappy Patchwork Quilt I saw on the Scraps n' Threadtales Blog.  I really like that one - and I could use some 3.5" squares and cut up random 3.5" strips from an overflowing bin to create the same effect.

I did a search on postage stamp quilts and found even more finished quilts that are pretty awesome!  I rather like the idea of bordering the patchwork blocks with a churn-dash (or is it called hole-in-the-barn?) like a this beauty I saw on My Current Obsessions Blog.

So many ideas.  I'll let you know what I decide...