May Cornucopia

Well, that was the May that was. I've probably spent a lot of time online this month. I'm just guessing I will be with the knee recovery. Okay, so hopefully I've kept track of some links to share with you in this cornucopia of links post. 

Here's a lot of the stuff that kept me entertained, taught me something, or was just beautiful or interesting:

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The Met Gala was very entertaining as usual to consume from far away, there were dresses made of sand, denim, cotton, aluminum foil, and a pocketbook made of actual ice. The theme was The Garden of Time, based on the short story by JG Ballard. I don't think many (if any) of the clothing designers read the really excellent story unfortunately. The central theme of the story doesn't really go with the excess of the Met Gala and the folks who appear at it, so not terribly surprising.

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Once again, MargArts video of her printing finds is quick and so fun, bicycle tires and so much more.

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I'm really enjoying the substack newsletter from Linda and Laura Kemshall, such great advice on thread choices, and free motion quilting as well as surface design stuff too.

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I'm not educated in biology or natural sciences, but articles like this one make me wish I'd chosen that path at UC Berkeley.

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The debate continues: glue basting vs. thread basting for EPP. A helpful video that shows both techniques.

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I love the Tiny Desk Concert winner this year, The Philharmonik from Sacramento. Such a great song!

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What's this? Siouxsie Sue and Iggy Pop singing The Passenger for an oddly risqué ice cream bar ad? Now I want an ice cream bar.

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More Strips

 

I feel like I'm living in Stripville or something, it's been all cutting strips today. The big left-hand section finally has all of the 20+ strips cut out and in their places (kinda). That took a lot to get done, and now I get to sew it together. Looking forward to being able to spread the rest of the blocks out in their correct positions.

I like this section of the teeny short 3.5" strips that will all be above the heart block at the top of the quilt.

This left-hand bottom section has more than 20 strips, yowza!

One Completed Section

 I got down to actually sewing together a section of the Bohemian Wife quilt yesterday. So excited to finally get started after all the block making and strip cutting.

I had a couple more strips to cut to finish the section and I realized one of the fabrics I chose was too high contrast. It's navy and white but reads as black and white. I swapped the larger 1.5" strip out for a less contrast-y fabric and kept the smaller 1" one and I think it works better.

There's one point in the assembly of this section that was a partial seam. I took it slow and hoped for the best.

Here's how the partial seam section turned out, no problem.

And now exactly one section (out of 11) is now done. Partial seams and all. I think it's looking pretty good. 

This feels somehow monumental to have gotten a piece of this beastie together. 

9 Bohemian Wife Strips

 

A lot more of the 60 Bohemian Wife "background" strips are up on the design wall along with the 72 blocks. Nine strips to be specific, all of them cut up into the line segments required. This is feeling like a Geometry pop quiz all of a sudden. Good thing I liked Geometry as a math subject! A bunch more strips are cut out and all labeled, but I'm putting them up in order from left to right so that I don't get confused. (Or more confused)

So far, so good I think, the blocks are distinct but also blending in with the background. That was the look that I was going for, instead of having something like a calmer, all solids or read-as-solid prints look. 

It's a bit of a mess, as was expected. I mean, I wouldn't usually put these particular 34 fabrics together. Thirty four different fabrics are in just this one picture...wow. So, yeah, it's going to be A Lot when it's all together. I'm almost to the point where I can try sewing together this first section. It took a bit to get confident on the instructions that I'm using to supplement the original pattern. 

Reaching 100

 
So many little tiny strips sewn together.

The Penultimate 9".

And here's...the One Hundredth! 

9" at a time every day, I made it through a whole lot of scraps to get to the end of one whole roll of Scrap Tape plus a little bit more. You can see that it is still connected to the new roll. I haven't decided what to with that connection quite yet. To sever or not to sever? Keep it connected for maybe next year's 100 Days Project? Or cut it off and do something different?

It's a great feeling to be done, towards the end of these 100 days, I realized I was becoming a bit tired of the project. But I'm pleased to not have quit on it and pushed through to finish up. Before I decide what's next for this little bundle of goodness, I'm going to just let myself be happy with being done for a couple days.

A Box of Roar!

I was so surprised to get my Pink Door Fabrics subscription box in the mail yesterday. It's got Tula Pink's latest line of fabric designs, Roar!, and all kinds of accompanying goodies. A Sew Sweetness pattern for the Allium bag, along with the hardware to make it. As well as a nicely sized zip-up bag to put it all in until I get it sewn. When I heard the fabric line was called Roar!, I didn't read the description, instead I guessed that it would be lions, etc., but nope--it's dinosaurs. A good surprise, as I like dinosaurs too.

There's so much fun extra stuff, that sticker is cracking me up, and I love the really pretty coordinating ribbons.

How fun is this hardware? Dinosaur pulls!

A lot of the prints together, such a variety of types of prints in various scales. It's going to be fun to come up with a good pattern to use them all.

A picture of just the main Dino prints, there's all of your favorites, T.Rex, Triceratops,Pterodactyl with lots of cool plants surrounding them.

Again, a very nice accompanying selection of solids.

Not going to lie, I'd wear a skirt made with this print. Or it would have made amazing curtain's for my kid's room back in the days when they were Dino crazy. I guess it'd be a pretty great pillowcase fabric as well. All sorts of uses for this one. There's another color way of the same print included that's pinks and oranges.

Cool Grid Control

 

At the last BAMQ meeting, I picked up a quilt roll from the Community Giving table. The great fabric in this interesting quilt top drew me in with the cool grid design. It looks like a tic-tac-toe board doesn't it? I like how the super busy fabric is controlled by placing the white grid of boxes and x's on top of it.

The backing fabric that was included is a very stiff white on white print which I hope doesn't impact the quilting too much. I have a feeling it's going to be quite noisy. You know, that pockit-tah-pockit-tah sound as the needle goes through and out again. If it's too challenging, I guess I'll just swap in something else.

Moving Through The 90's

 

A hidden gnome peeks in as I finally approach the end of this 100 Days project. There are only three days left to go, hard to believe I'm almost there.

Really like this combination of grey and blues. Very peaceful. (adding to maybe someday quilt palettes)

Dots to dots.

Bold piecing of scraps from the Inspo. block.

A good variety of print types.

Teeny strips are mostly leftovers from Sizzix cuttings. 

Inspo Block 2

 

The second round of sashing strips are laid out on the finished 9 sashed four-squares blocks from the inspo block that I was working on yesterday.

I sewed the sashed four-squares on to the sashing with the seams side up so I could make sure the seams all ended up sewn open in the same way.

Cut the 9 sections off of the sashing strip.

First two strips added, the last two strips laid on top.

And done!

Block Inspo

 

This interesting block was on the donation quilts table at the most recent BAMQ meeting and it's been on my mind ever since. I wish I'd measured it, but it was a pretty big block, I'm guessing it was somewhere between 12.5 to 14.5" square or so with the individual squares probably 2.5". I tried researching the block to see if there were examples and found something similar called Grandma's Windows, but it wasn't quite the same thing. 

I am not that much of a quilt block detective so I soon gave up as the block looked fairly easy to assemble on my own without a pattern. Instead of cutting out a bunch of 2.5" squares, I decided to use one of the charm packs I've been hoarding for no certain purpose. This was the purpose it turned out!

If you're counting, that's 36 squares. These are pretty cute fabrics, but not really my style so they're perfect for this experiment.

For the smaller sashing I guessed that it was probably .75"and the larger sashing 1". How funny, as I was writing this I noticed that friend Jaye also posted just yesterday about the very same block, GMTA* and all that. She thought the sashing might be 5/8" and 3/4". So...I ddi a little test sewing some extra squares together using the two sashing combinations. Yes I wrote the sashing widths on the selvedges ends.

I thought the .75"and 1" sashing looked about right, so I went with that choice as it's easier to measure and manage. I wasn't too worried about the fabric placement, but I like the idea of the four corners being the darker solids and I just didn't want too many similar patterns right next to each other.

I sewed the squares to the smaller sized sashing.

I pressed open, then sewed the matching square from the pair on the other side of the sashing lining up the edges of the squares.

I cut those apart and then sewed them on the long side to the crossways sashing. And repeated on the other side of the sashing, making sure to line up the seams.

I cut them apart into squares and pressed them. I think it's looking pretty great. Onto sashing #2 tomorrow.

*GMTA=Great Minds Think Alike

Pyramidal Surprise

 

A lovely surprise thank you gift from Bamq for helping out on the retreat committee. A fun pyramidal zip bag. 

I love the great Tula Pink fabrics and the little ribbon loops at the top and bottom of the zipper.

What a thoughtful and useful gift. It was really great to get an acknowledgment of the time and work it takes to make the retreat happen for the group.

Hunt For Gray

I'm on the hunt for the right gray to finish off the sashing for my City Sampler. This was the closest Kona gray (Haze 94580) that they had at my LQS, Hart's Fabric. I thought it would be worthwhile to try it out in my workroom and see if it was close enough. Nope. Much too light.

I used a Fabric marker to write the solid info on the selvedge before washing it. Also one FQ ended up coming home from Harts. I also received my order of another fusible batting roll and a new roll of Scrap Tape, just in time to finish off my 100 Days.

I'm glad I kept the fabric marker in the package so that I could find my highlighted note.

The fabric marker did fade a slight bit, but not much. So washing didn't help matters as far as matching up grays. I'll take another swing at finding the right gray at Golden State next week. Luckily I have lots of other projects to work on. But I'm so close to getting the top assembled.