A Prairie Home Quilts

Quite some time ago, I was on The Quilt Index and saw a quilt that was named moon in 4 phases or seasons or something like that.  The name sparked a connection to the Drunkard’s Path pieces that  I’ve been playing with a lot lately.  It got me thinking about using Drunkard’s Path pieces in a way that would depict the moon’s phases.  [I told you The Quilt Index was a dangerous place for me.] What about the quilt?  I can’t even tell you exactly what pattern it was.  It really didn’t speak to me.  Not the pattern nor the colorway — just the title and I can’t even remember if it was the title of the block layout or just a title the quilt maker gave her quilt.

I played around in EQ6 and came up with a design I liked.  I found some scraps to use in my pile of landscape fabrics.  I wanted to make this up and test my skills at sewing multiple curved seams with the sewing machine.  I felt I needed to get some practice in before I start on my many Drunkard’s Path pattern ideas.  After doing this top and some units for the Rose Basket wall hanging, I can do them fairly quickly & accurately with only 3 pins so I think I’m ready.  Here is the EQ6 design and my finished top.

You can see in the finished top that I ended up changing the position of the colors from my original EQ6 design.  I didn’t like my pink color next to the orange-y, golden brown when I had it all laid out.  The green looks better next to it.  I don’t know what I’m going to do with this top yet.  It may just become another practice piece for my hand quilting.

I’ve been working on my Crooked Path [aka Drunkard's Path] Rose Basket.  It didn’t turn out as I’d envisioned.  The roses came out smaller than I’d imagined and the basket came out larger.

This just wasn’t going to work.  The flower arrangement is suppose to overshadow the container not the other way around.  These roses really underwhelm the basket.  I was using the Clover medium-sized rose maker for the roses and switching to the large size was only going to add about 1/2″ to the rose — still not large enough.  [A side note about the Clover roses. . .  I really do like them. They're quite cute and easy to make. I will have to dream up another project to use them.]

I needed to play around with some different ideas so I hung up the basket on the design wall to percolate.  I wondered if I made a wider, longer tube and twisted and turned it while wrapping it, would it give me larger rose that would still look nice?

It kind of looks like a cabbage rose.  I think.  So there it sits on the design wall.  We’ll see how I feel about it in a few more days, but now things are looking  a bit rosier.  [tee hee]

Another recently started cut-and-not-yet-started-to be-sewn-project is a rose basket wall hanging.  I made myself a little crazy on this one by purchasing four batiks that I really liked instead of only the three that I needed.  I liked all four of them equally well, and I liked all four of them together so it made it difficult to eliminate one.

Did I like the roses against the lovely gray batik or against the dark one better?  The dark won out.  My inspiration for this quilt is a photo that has a black background so the dark gives the effect I was originally going for.

The decision on the background helped with the fabrics for the basket.  After I got all the fabrics home, I liked the dark with one of the batiks I bought for the basket.  But I couldn’t use it in the basket if I was using it for the background.  These two fabrics made an appearance together in the 9 patch block for my Inklingo Sampler.

So these two won out for the basket design which I realize makes no difference whatsoever to any of you because you haven’t seen any of the design idea.  Teehee.  Another Top Secret Area 51 project maybe? Probably not since I’ve given away too many details and even shown you some of the roses…

Don’t you just love batiks?  Well, I do.  If I had the money for a large fabric stash, it’d be mostly batiks I think.  All these yummy fabrics are for one of my newly started projects–one of the ones that I’ve cut fabric bits for but haven’t started sewing yet.  These are for the pattern in development called Nevada, hence the name of this post.  Area 51 is just down the road a ways from where I live in Nevada–well, that is if you could actually get there.  According to information on Wikipedia, you could be risking your life to get there [read the Wikipedia article portion: US Government's positions on Area 51].  I know people who’ve worked there that would joke they could tell you what they do, but then they’d have to kill ya.  [It'll be interesting to see who ends up on this post from the search engines.]  Anyway, mine is a “top secret” project only to be revealed upon completion–kinda like the stealth bomber. *wink*

The tea tote tutorial is finally posted as a page on my blog.  You can find the link on my sidebar under Tutorials.

• That’s one non-quilting, quilting-related computer project DONE.
• I made a substantial dent in the second non-quilting, quilting-related computer project by copying and pasting all my website pages over from MS FrontPage to Joomla.  Now they all need to be reorganized and the old pages taken off the server.
• The third non-quilting, quilting-related computer project remains untouched.
• I also made a substantial dent in a bag of Dove Dark Chocolate during this process.

This is a photo of my contribution to the Inklingo Projects Blog Giveaway called Welcome Spring! Naturally my sample isn’t finished yet — I need to quilt & bind it.  I hand pieced mine, but this can easily be sewn by machine.  I’ve sewn some of the Inklingo Drunkard’s Path curves by machine for another DP project I’m working on & I can say with confidence that they sew up very nicely by machine.

The winner of my giveaway will receive fabrics printed with the Drunkard’s Path pieces to  cut & sew to complete this 18″ x 18″ block.  It can then be used as a wall hanging or table topper.  I’m including the binding & complete instructions.  My LQS was out of the purple batik, however, so I purchased some pink for the giveaway.  Head on over to the Inklingo Projects Blog to sign up for the giveaways!  There are some other great projects being given away also.