Nature Walk

We live surrounded by beautiful woods.  Mark and I took a walk back in our woods.  We were noticing newly fallen trees (a rich part of any ecosystem in the woods).  As we were walking back up to the house I saw a pile of feathers, then a head.  It was a newly killed red tailed hawk.  Nearby was a fallen tree on which the rest of the hawk's body had been devoured.  It was similar to other bird kills (song birds) where we would see a pile of feathers a remnant beak.

Hawks are pretty high on the food chain. We have bald eagles, barred owls and great horned owls.  Not sure which was the predator, but it was efficiently dispatched.

A reminder that nature while beautiful is not hospitable at times.  Eat or be eaten.

Quilting with Jeanne

Happily, Jeanne has provided a wealth of quilting videos to help those of us learning how to machine quilt.  You can find her here.  Sadly, Jeanne has passed.  I looked her up on the internet to find that she was about an hour from me, but I also stumbled upon her obituary.

While there is much about the internet that is just "stuff in the sausage casing" there is also much that is posted that inspires and educates us.  Jeanne's quilting videos do just that.  They are not glamorous videos.  They are the videos of pithy content: a teacher's inspiration and patient, repetitive exposition.

The hurdles of a beginner quilter are many, but  of short duration, so long as one is eager to ferret out the root of errors. Once one goes through the process of putting a quilt together, the matter of quilting it becomes a another hurdle.

One design that Jeanne demonstrates is making poppies.This method is somewhat different than what she generates in another lesson. However, try it (and look because I'm too lazy to find the other).  I use this for my girl baby quilts along with others. Jeanne is a consummate teacher.  Check out her other videos on feathers and the like.

Jeanne, you are gone, but I sent this heartfelt message out to the Universe: Thank you for sharing your craft with us.

Finished Quilt - Piper Girls Daisy Baby Quilt

Here's another Daisy Baby Quilt (Piper Girls free pattern).  Still needs some more quilting within the white blocks, but I ran out of white thread--it's on the way.  I quilted diagonally (in the ditch) of all the blocks, and limited free motion quilting to the white squares and side/corner triangles.  I used 2.5" strips for the colored blocks (purchased at Tuesday Morning for $3.47).  I also used my strip production method as I described in this post. It is a huge time saver and increases accuracy.  My blocks were perfect and my piecing was perfect as well.  I glue basted all of my points.  All seams are pressed to the background.  To keep points flat, I clipped the corners which enable the seams to to be flat on the back (always to background--which takes the twist out of the seam allowance).

The border is a gray on gray print, and the back is a Dear Stella (White Day Break Starburst).  I purchased it at $2.99 a yard on line.  I have an affinity for gray--the perfect neutral blend of white and black.


I have been using a 2.5" border, but 2.25" would have worked better.  I folded it over to take some of the width out, with okay results.  But all of my diamonds line up beautifully.  I used 5 colors in the strips and a white backgrounds.  I used the top row as my metric for successive diamond placement taking the 3rd diamond from each row and starting the the next row and repeating the top row sequence.  It's a brainless way to have lovely, even distribution of blocks.

My free motion quilting is improving. I have a long way to go, but I'm not embarrased by it.  Practice builds mastery.

The Accidental Block

B&W of the Accidental Block


I was intrigued with some of the quilts made using the XBlocks Quilting Ruler. (They call it a rotary cutting tool).  The above block is made with a light purple batik on a white background.  I desatured to experiment using different colors.

I call it the "Accidential Block" as I was playing around with a Baby Basix which uses 1.5 " strips (v. 2.5" strips for the larger patterns).  I had nothing particularly in mind other than to conquer my spatially inhibited brain in using the ruler.

You see, the ruler has a ruler up and a ruler down position...and if you turn your fabric upside down, as I did in my experimentation, but not pictured here), you get some differences again.

The above block is a 16 patch...4 groupings of 4 blocks.   The first quad (right) is ruler up (I call this right side) and the second quad (left) is ruler down (I call this wrong side).  The flipping of the ruler gives you mirror images.  When you put an adjacent block together, you get a horizontal diamond, v. the vertical shown here. A gaggle of these blocks looks quite nice.  I made 4 of these blocks (no small feat on my end).  I will piece them into the back of a quilt that I'm making for my step mother.

Yes, the back of the block is a 'mess of' seams.  Yes, cutting these small blocks is time consuming, but I am so happy with the end result.  One could do a lot creative "stuff".  When making this block, I had to resort to a schematic to make sure that I organized the right/wrong side of the ruler blocks as well as the strips (light, dark, light; dark, light, dark). 

That I flipped fabric over was another thing entirely...but it was my way of flipping things over in real time,  v. trying to conceptualize it in my head...something that makes my head hurt.

I will definitely experiment with this block in both layouts and color ways.