Amethyst is a Flimsy!

 

The purple quilt I have decided to call Amethyst, is now a flimsy. It measures 66" wide by79" tall. The HST's are 3" and the border is about 6" wide. The binding will be the same fabric as the border.

I also made the border for the orange Carnelian quilt. You can see both bindings hanging with all the others, above. 

I should be getting the Little Boxes, Harlequin and Kangamangus quilts back from the long arm quilter later this week. I'm looking forward to finishing them up.

Amethyst Gets a Border

 

The purple fabric for the border of the Amethyst quilt arrived and after running it through the washer and dryer I cut it in steps and set it next to the quilt. At first I wasn't so sure.

But when I set it all around the quilt and looked at it from a distance, I was happy. So I am working on getting that sewn to the quilt. The binding will be the same purple, so you won't notice it. I already have the backing fabric for it, so it will go in the closet ready to bring to be quilted.

I also ordered orange fabric for the binding of the Carnelian (orange) quilt. So I will be boringly quilty busy the next couple of days.

Amethyst Almost Flimsy

 

Here is a detail of the purple Amethyst quilt. I thought you might like to see some of the fabrics.

Here is the almost flimsy. I say almost because I plan to add a 6" border of dark purple all around, and the fabric hasn't arrived yet.

I went shopping at Home Goods for potholders (because I had a gift card). I didn't see any potholders I liked, so I got this wreath for my front door instead. When I got to the register the gal said, "I just put those out this morning!" Lucky me!

I'm eager for the weather to warm up enough so I can work outside in the yard, cleaning it up for the new year and getting things looking good. I'm planning a small vegetable garden - green beans, cucumbers, zucchini and some peppers, the usual herbs and lettuces and a sunflower or two. I bought a smallish raised bed planter last year and put chives in it. They are coming back nicely and yesterday I planted some Arugula, Spinach and Leaf lettuces. We'll see how they do.

I love Tony Hillerman's detective novels set in Navajo country in the Southwest. I've read them all, and am in the process of re-reading them. They have a wonderful sense of place and his main protagonist, Joe Leaphorn is thoughtful and conscientious. Also in the books are Jim Chee and Bernadette Manuelito. After Hillerman died his daughter Anne has taken up the characters and the locale and the stories continue. Anne's books focus on Bernadette Manuelito, also a Navajo cop, who is by now married to Jim Chee. The "legendary lieutenant" (Leaphorn) has now retired, but offers his expertise in this new series of books. 

Some of the original Leaphorn books have been made into a television series called Dark Winds. I am not a fan. That they have deviated from the original storylines somewhat doesn't bother me as much as what the TV series has done to Leaphorn himself. They made him do something the original Leaphorn would NEVER have done, and it really bothers me. I'll watch the series because I'm too far along and I want to see how the TV version resolves itself, but I won't watch another one.

Webbing the Purple Quilt

 

I  got most of the HST blocks up on the design wall and then worked on fine tuning the layout, one quarter at a time.

I'm webbing the quilt together, one quarter at a time too.

I have a love-hate relationship with webbing a quilt together.

Here the bottom half of the quilt is sewn together, I am in the process of sewing up the upper left quadrant and I have to fine tune the design of the upper right section. This quilt will have a wide border (I think), and the name of it might be Amethyst, unless I can come up with something better.

More Purples

 

My light purple fabrics came in. 

I ran them through the washer and dryer and made new HSTs.

I started putting the purple HSTs on the wall.

Now I have to tell you, this just wasn't floating my boat. I don't know if it was because I'm still feeling tired from my collision with the pavement two weeks ago, or that purple just isn't my jam. 

I went online and did a search of quilts made from HSTs and got an idea. I rearranged my HSTs, and this gets me worked up. I like this and will have a lot of fun playing with it.

Tangram

Remember the game Tangram?

My sister had it on her Kindle Fire and I thought it looked fun so I downloaded it to mine and started playing.

It's a puzzle game, and you make different shapes and configurations using the seven flat shapes (called "tans".)

 So I started playing,

and in no time at all I was filling shape after shape, most of them in less than a minute. I finished up the "geometric shapes" and moved on to animals.

Those weren't very hard either, and the thing that aggravated me the most was flipping the yellow parallelogram. It kept getting stuck, and cost me valuable seconds. Heck, I wanted to see if I could solve one in less than 30 seconds (So far my record is 26. They're not all that easy. Some have taken me as much as ten minutes.)

Then I started thinking, "This is lame. It isn't even HARD! How come it is so easy for me? I look at the shape and know quickly how to arrange the pieces, but more importantly, I already understand the relationship of the shapes to each other?  Why is that?

Well, the answer was pretty obvious once I thought about it. These are really nothing more than combinations of variously sized HST's, and as a quiltmaker, I'm intimately familiar with how they work together.

I'm going to continue working my way through them, even though they aren't much of a challenge any more, but seeing the various ways these seven shapes can make various cats, dogs, birds and other animals is a great resource for making free pieced animals. I don't have to make them exactly like the puzzles in the game, but it's a great place to start experimenting.

You know how I keep saying you never know where you'll find inspiration? Well you never know where you'll find a good idea either, or a good resource!