Cooking With Gas

 For the last few weeks I've kinda been stuck. I've had some things to do, (meaning in the studio) and I've done them but aside from checking them off the "honey-do" list, their completion hasn't really felt very gratifying.

Now the horrors (and I don't use that word casually) of the things going on in our country right now have certainly played their part. My heating company has already notified me that my monthly heating expenses will increase next month, and the company that provides my prescription coverage for Medicare won't be offering it next year. It's damned scary. Make sure to vote come Election Day. To say nothing of the price of gas which is over $4.00 a gallon.

I know I have to finish my granddaughter's no-batting quilt, but what's holding me back is the idea of ironing that gigantic piece of backing fabric, and then getting down on my hands and knees to lay the top on the back and pin it in place so I can tie it... I know I have to do it, but it's hard work at my age and I'm procrastinating.

And while I generally have SOME idea of what kind of quilt I want to make next, in this case I just haven't had a clue.

So I sat in my chair in the studio and looked at the stash. What did I have a lot of that I hadn't touched in a while? Black and Whites. I have a lot of them, and I have a sweater sized plastic bin full of bits of black and white fabrics. OK, so HOW could I use these and make something interesting that I hadn't done? I did not want to do another Macnas quilt, or another Scrap Slab Triangle quilt, or another bird quilt.

Flipping through a couple of quilt books gave me the idea of a modified Snowball block, or a square with one corner chopped off and another fabric inserted in a triangle in one corner. Yeah, that's nice, but I didn't want something too predictable. If I would use a lot of fabrics from my black and white collection, I needed the traingles in the corners to be different.

And I didn't want them HST's either. I wanted them long triangles, twice as tall as they are wide. And I knew about the proportion of them. I felt a 6" block would be too big, so I'd want a block that would finish  out at 4".

After MUCH tinkering, I had this, and I liked the size and the proportions. Getting to this was tricky because although I knew how to cut the colored triangle block consistently, but working out how to cut the angle in the corner consistently and reliably took several iterations of attempts.

I wanted the triangles in the corner to be exactly the same size throughout the quilt, so next I had to work out how to cut those.

As it turned out I could use leftover Macnas blocks.

Which was really good because I have a LOT of them.

Here's how I'll sew a colored triangle to the white "square." Yes, it's bigger. Lots bigger.

Once the triangle is sewn and pressed, I'll trim it using this ruler. As you can see I have marked the ruler with tape to identify the outside edges. I'll trim off the excess and end up with a perfect block, like the second photo in this post. 

Sure I've got to trim it, but quite frankly every block you sew into a quilt should be trimmed square before you sew it to other blocks. That's how your quilt will always lie flat. This isn't wasting fabric, although I've heard some complaints, but for me the greater waste is wasting TIME, because you can never get that back. Doing it my way means it's a lot less fiddly, with much simpler cutting and fewer burned fingers from pressing a too small piece of fabric.

So here are twelve of them. I don't like the pink at the center of the bottom row, but that's not the thing you know about until you put blocks up on the design wall. But I like the direction where this is headed, and I already have some ideas of how I will tinker with this. 

At 4" square, I'll need about 286 blocks to make a quilt 18 rows tall by 16 blocks wide.

I've got a fair amount of work to do before I can really see where this is going. But now I'm "cooking with gas!"**

** (translation: I know what I'm doing, and I'm humming right along.)