No Fooling, April

 

No fooling, it's already April? Not an April Fool's joke fortunately/unfortunately, the marching on of time proceeds as scheduled.

This month's monthly marker is as always a combination of two photos in the app, SnapSeed. First ,the nearly finished quilting checkerboard-ish color palette challenge.

And then second, Leeloo and the Slopes laid on top and messed with.

March had 31 days, so this 1SE video is 3 seconds longer than last's month's.

Monthly I-Did List for March

I trimmed to size all 200 of the beginning blocks for the second month of the Color Collective.

I finished machine embroidering two SJSA blocks and handed them off to be assembled into a quilt.

I finished my fussy cut  Rock Candy table topper.

I assembled and quilted the Clover side of the floor pillow I'm making.

I kept going on the Secret Lives of Color quilt-a-long and will post about it maybe never. 

I very  occasionally added to my Visual Journal aka Ephemera Journal.

I blogged here 28/31 days, Instagrammed 8 times, tweeted 20 times and spouted (on Spoutible) 8 times.

I traveled for a week in San Diego and did some travel watercolors and more hand-stitching on an older project.

I survived a week without hot water (new water heater yay!) almost a week without power and the loss of eight redwood trees in the big storm. All that weather stuff has been very disruptive to my daily schedule, it's getting annoying honestly, but I'm counting myself very lucky not having our house get demolished by falling trees like many others.

March Cornucopia

 

March is done, and here's the cornucopia post roundup of all the things I enjoyed this month online. It's a smorgasbord this time for sure. After the February emoji-explosion went so well, I decided to do one for St. Patrick's Day green decoration purposes, please enjoy all (and I mean all) of the green emojis. None of which are at all St. Patrick's Day related though, ie no shamrocks, tam-o-shanters, leprechauns, green beer, etc.

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I think this free placemat pattern is very cool, and it'd be pretty easy to make a matching table runner as well.

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Quilter's Color Mixer online teaching event on Creative Spark is today at 9am. If you sign up, you can watch all of the presentations later.

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Collage Lab Spring Fling is an April event, a great variety of recorded and live classes in all sorts of collage related topics.

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Visions Museum of Textile Art is having an Art Quilt Auction in April.

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I really like this quilt block, Beautiful Star and this quilt made from found vintage blocks.

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Relax for three minutes and watch this beautiful and elegant video of Kumihimo Braiding.

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A very nicely illustrated and explained 32 HSTs All At Once tutorial.

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A beautiful read by one of my favorite authors/reporters Leah Sottile about Butte, Montana. And then read this oh so achingly perfect essay too.

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I read this fascinating interview with Jane Bennett, The Philosopher Who Believes In Living Things and recognized myself quite clearly.

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I have learned so much interesting history from Talia Lavin's Sword & the Sandwich sub stack series on Notable Sandwiches. Well worth a read along with her other writing of course.

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This stitched button is making me lose it, it's so beautiful!

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On the 2oth anniversary of the Iraq war, the best thing I read was this: The Unlearned Lessons From The War In Iraq by Spencer Ackerman, "you don't have to reflect on a war if that war doesn't end, let alone pay reparations for your crimes"

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A fun and more challenging daily word game similar to wordle, it's called Wordnym. Give it a try and see if you like it.

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This is an interesting take on a tote bag, make a tote bag, but make it ruffle-y.

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On April 15th, there's going to be an online or in-person lecture on the California Art Quilt Revolution by Nancy Savor.

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Tips & Tricks for Sewing With Wovens by Ruby Star Society, I could have used a few of these recently.

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Checkerboard-ish

After getting all the lovely new fabric washed, I've sorted it out and decided to actual get down to using some instead of just petting it...So, off to the races on getting a mini quilt done for the SBAMQG challenge. I was given the above pallete challenge, and have to use at least 3 out of 5 of the colors.

I decided to an improvisational type of thing instead of sketching or EQ8-ing a design. The main thing I was starting with besides the color was size on the smallish side, ie able to be finished by 4/4. 

I started with 1" strips of the two blues and began the process to get to my one of my favorite go-to's: checkerboard. I cut them up into 2.5" sections.

I randomly sewed the 2.5" checkerboard-ish sections to the ends of some 2.5" wide strips, not paying attention to which direction the checkerboards were going. I arranged the strips and cut and sewed ad re-cut them until I liked the look of things.

the colors are all wrong in this photo, but I still wanted to show how this looks a little closer up.

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Time to add the third color into the mix. I cut a .75"wide strip of the fuchsia (magenta? as well as a slightly smaller .63"wide strip

Here's how it looks with the inserted small diagonal strips. I think this is done, except for perhaps some sort of small border that incorporates the other two remaining colors. I'm looking forward to getting this quilted tomorrow.

Shifting Slopes

I counted and figured out how many blocks I made, 200 exactly. Which is funny because I know that I did not at all plan for an even number like that. Just ended up that way? Eleven of them aren't included here as they were mis-cut due to my problem with figuring out the trimming instructions. So, I probably shouldn't use them. A few of them are probably not that far off but I'm not sure if I want to try and fudge it with a design like this that relies on all the diagonals matching up.

I've left the main part of the layout mostly untouched and fiddled around with the edges a bit. I've introduced some diagonal stripes a bit and I'm considering playing with that a bit more across the whole quilt. I will try that as I move the blocks around. I also might change the dimensions of the layout, taking out a column and adding a row.

Leeloo squinching up her eyes in hello to DS as he makes comments on the quilt in progress. He likes it a lot, so maybe I'll give this one to him when it's all done.
 

Slopes On The Wall

 

Finally, all the Slopes blocks were trimmed. I was so relieved, I can't even tell you. I had to really push through to finish trimming all of them. I'm not going to count them until I put them up on the wall, that'll be easier.

And that meant it was finally time to put them up on the wall and see how it looked. This is not all of the blocks, there's probably a little less than half left to put up. This was a very random placement and I messed up the bottom left corner from the regular diamond pattern. I like how my eyes can't decide where the diamonds are. I'm going to have to play around a little more with this before I start sewing. There were some good ideas in the Color Collective group on various arrangements, like arranging them more by color groupings.

Still On The Slopes

 

I'm at the all-too-familiar point in the process that I'm questioning why I made So Many blocks?!?! It's getting kind of old trimming all of these, because I want to get going on the sewing. I'm tempted to count how many, but that's just a delay tactic, it doesn't really matter at the moment how many there are.

The pile of trimmings is getting higher and higher as the stack of to-be-trimmed lefties and righties gets lower.

The two piles on the left are all the trimmed lefties and righties. The two on the right are the untrimmed ones. It looks like I'm finally past the halfway mark.  Wow, that glowing pink Trinket ruler really stands out in the picture doesn't it?

The ruler really glows in the big amount of sunlight that I now get in my workroom due to the absence of the trees that fell over in the storm last week. I may have to rearrange things in there to account for possible sun fading issues. Unfortunately the forecast is for another bomb cyclone situation again on Tuesday. Turbulent Tuesdays they're calling it because the storms keep arriving as if on schedule on Tuesday. 

The Time To Trinket

I received part of my order from Alison Glass which includes the crazy neon pink ruler, and some cute notecards. This is displayed on the still to be washed fabric I’ll be using to make the Trinket quilt.

Here’s a better shot of the Trinket ruler, all the blocks we’ll be making are 4.5”. It was just so cute and colorful, I couldn’t resist.

I made myself a little dedicated note book for the Trinket sew along decorated with the pretty postcard included in my order. And as you can see by the first two blocks pictured, I’m starting to print out the paper pieced block patterns to get ahead of the schedule.

And as directed, I measured them just to be sure that my printer was being precise enough.