A Prairie Home Quilts

I think Northcott should just send me a big ole box of Stonehenge fabrics so I can make up the 5 or 6 projects I have planned in this fabric.

[A girl can dream, right?]

I was too lazy to finish the vines and leaves on the other three blocks for this next one so you’ll have to dream that they’re there…

The color scheme is a little wild on this last one but I like it. Imagine, once again, vines & leaves in the borders of this one.

EDITED Later in the day…  I had the wrong sunflower blocks in the border and I added the stems so I uploaded a new image.  Imagine the leaves are larger because I would make them larger.  The colors remind me of Fiestaware.

My fabric is stored 100 miles away…  I’m still playing in EQ.

For months now I haven’t been able to play with fabric as it’s all packed up because the house is on the market, and I haven’t been able to blog because I couldn’t get into the admin panel. Soooo, I’ve been playing with EQ to keep from slowing going insane…

So, where have you been, I hear you all asking?  [Imagining to myself there’s at least one someone out there still listening after all this time… ] Welp, doing some house sitting, of course, and on a spiritual journey of sorts.  Yes, again.  Involving dragons again, too.  But, you know, I came away with a deeper understanding of the Hymn of the Soul and the meaning of the pearl.  Oh and the great Hydra was involved.  It was worth every minute of the journey.  Hehehe.  I will spare you the details of my spiritual epiphanies, though.  Really.  I’m sure you are more interested in the quilting I’ve been doing.  Wait, how could I forget?  There was a magical wedding and children visiting from far away lands happening in the middle of all this, too!

And I should probably fess up that I’ve been doing some writing also.  November is National Novel Writing Month, did you know that?  According to the Office of Light and Letters it is.  [Love their slogan:  We believe in ambitious acts of the imagination.]  The challenge is to write 50K words in 30 days.  I spent part of October preparing to write and I’ve written every day in November [obviously nothing for the blog!].  I’m at just under 39K as of this morning and hoping to hit 40K by tonight.  No one but me will ever read the thing, but it’s been another fun part of the journey to slay the great Hydra and let my imagination soar.

Okay, okay, on with the quilting…

I’ve been working on my .75″ hexagon project, Field of Flowers.  It was stalled.  I didn’t have all the flowers prepped.  I decided to go ahead and do that with Inklingo.  I can’t remember now how many flowers I needed but I printed and cut enough sets of flowers and centers to have 512 flowers when they’re all stitched. [I need 502.]  Then I went ahead and printed the corners and edges in the green fabric I’d purchased eons ago.

I started this project working from the middle out and then decided it would be so much easier to start from a corner as I was always getting the middle portion twisted around.  I have more than half the flowers done.  I feel like I’m making a huge dent in this project.

New starting point — bottom, left corner

Some finished flowers.

The box with the remaining flower sets.

And more of the wedding, just because…

Oldest daughter, Jessica with groom’s younger brother

Youngest daughter, Rachelle with groom’s older brother

Michelle and Jared McCarty

Daughters again…

Oldest son, Nathan and his lovely wife, Koren.

When I ordered Christmas fabric online to make a tree skirt, I had to order 1/2 yard of each of the fabrics I planned to use.  I had about 1/4 yard of each left after I cut out the tree skirt. The stripe caught my eye as a great fabric to fussy cut using the Lucy Boston Patchwork of the Crosses [POTC] collection. The main shape in the collection is an elongated hexagon. When you fussy cut using a striped fabric, it’s easier to get a kaleidoscopic effect. Here are the 3 blocks I was able to create with the leftover fabric.

Instead of printing onto the back of the fabric like you would normally do with Inklingo, I printed the hexagon and square shapes onto freezer paper and cut them out.  Then I ironed the freezer paper to the front of the fabric to make it easier to fussy cut each shape exactly the same.

I needed 2 sets of 4 and 1 set of 8 matching hexagons for each block.  Also some squares were needed for the corners and connectors.  I wasn’t as excited about the kaleidoscope effect the squares made and some of the hexagons that I cut.  I discovered the in order to get the best effect, the hexagons should be cut perpendicular to the stripe and the squares need to be cut on the diagonal.  [But I didn't discover that until I started sewing the shapes together and by then I was out of fabric.]

Pretend that the stripe runs horizontally all the way across the fabric here…  This is how to orient the hexagons — at least for the center and next row of the block.  You can see in the second and third blocks that the last row of 8 hexagons also looks okay with the stripe running through the length of the hexagon.  In that instance, iron on the freezer paper with the hexagon points going horizontally instead of vertically.

The squares look best when you iron the freezer paper on to fussy cut them this way…  Once again, imagine that the stripe runs horizontally all the way across the fabric.  [This was the only fabric I could lay my hands on this afternoon that had any sort of stripe to show what I'm trying to explain.]

After the blocks were done, the design dilemma monster reared its head.  What to use for the border around each block?? The red and green in the Christmas fabric was hard to match.  For the tree skirt I ended up with some Fairy Frost Glitz fabric.

Uhm, no. This is just way more sparkle and glitz than I want to use here.  I did like the gold border framing the block though.

Much better.  I purchased some regular Fairy Frost in a gold and black when I was first trying to match the green and red so I used them.  It’ll be a table runner.  It measures approximately 11″ x 31″.

Not totally jazzed with the square sections all being different and wondering how this might look as a table topper, I played around in Paint Shop Pro.  I’m thinking I need to order a bit more of this fabric. The fabric is Holiday Flourish III Elegant Stripe Crimson by Peggy Toole.

The edges might look better in black only although I do like the design effect in 3 of the corners.  The center squares might be nicer surrounded by black much the way the original POTC looks.  More playing with Paint Shop Pro ensued.  Oh, and imagine that each block looks different here… [teehee]

A project for next year maybe…

Apparently not a lot has changed in my life in a year’s time.  One year ago I was house sitting and finishing this top…

Scrappy 9 Patch – 11 August 2009

Today I’m house sitting and finished this top…

Plaid 9 Patch

I like the plaid one more.

A Tale of Love…

One hundred Dresden Plates. It started with one and then I added ninety-nine more.  Because I couldn’t resist. A quilt top and five sets of placemats in progress.