WIP - flower quilt

This is a WIP post, where "WIP" stands for "What In the name of all that is holy are you triPping on, and where can I get some, because I, too, wish to make fugly art quilts."  

Behold:

This, above, is what I started with.  It's really my first shot at improv piecing, if you could call it that.  The first solution to this mess that popped into my head was to cut each piece down by half an inch per side, because if it had to be fugly, at least  there could be less of it.  

Instead, I spent my precious last two hours of quilting time for awhile unpicking and redoing to come up with this:

And, wow.  Still so bad.  

If you were to make a ranked list of my intelligence and talents, the ability to remember where I left the chocolate (choco-spatial) intelligence would be easily in the top three, and any other spatial pieces would be way, way down in the 700s or so.  After things like my cooking ability, dexterity with small talk, or facility driving backwards.  

The driving backwards thing may actually be related, though (ahhaha, I have crashed into SO MANY THINGS driving backwards!).  Do you know how many attempts it took me to get one of those pieces lined up so that the yellow-edged triangle was at the angle I wanted?  Four.  Four separate times I added a piece of fabric onto the edge, thinking that once it was attached, I'd be able to cut a 4" square out of it.  And, to ice this Cake of Pathos, there's about 1/16th" that's just going to have to be eaten in the seam allowance.  

I have no idea how I'm going to quilt it.  

Let's move on!  Here's a baby blanket I just completed.  

Pattern is Blake's Baby Blanket, yarn is KnitPicks Swish in Dove Heather.  It's crazy soft and went through the washer and dryer well the first time.  For once I did well estimating how many to cast on given the desire for a blanket taller than it is wide and the amount of yarn I had.  Then it turned out I'd ordered six balls when I thought I'd ordered five, so I could've made it bigger.  Grumble.  

Happy crafting! 

A Mini for Spotted Guy

My last finish for a bit here is this mini quilt made from mini tumblers left over from the back of the twin-sized tumbler quilt.  

The top was a leaders-and-enders project and the back is from a half-yard that I got for the big tumblers but turned out to be more brownish than orangeish. 

It looks orangeish here, but I swear it's brownish. 

I practiced my stitch-in-the-ditch on this, using orange thread on the front and white on the back.  Meant to practice sewing down bias binding on this one, but then I ended up doing the big quilt first.  

Four minis and the twin-sized quilt all got navy binding. After the first night of hand sewing, I got an impressive callous on my right middle finger pad, so I declared myself the Jimi Hendrix of sewing down navy binding.  It is the only thing I ever plan to be the Jimi Hendrix of, so I made sure to enjoy it. 

And an action shot:

Linking up with Finish It Up Friday at crazy mom quilts.

Happy crafting!

If Things Were Different

Pretty soon after I picked quilting back up, I sketched this mini quilt and the quilting pattern out.  

Adding some medium blues to the darks and lights from my stash, I got a gradient that I ended up pretty happy with, although there was a lot of standing as far away as possible and looking through red film and rearranging. 

This is another one-of-two minis - the second will be for my mom (she already has the socks on the same theme), and I plan to finally admit that I need to mark quilting lines if they need to turn out straight. 

This was my first time quilting with perle cotton 8, which turns out nicely, but was really hard to hand quilt with using whatever embroidery needle that was around. 

I'm linking up again to Crazy Mom Quilts for Finish it Up Friday.  

Happy crafting!