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I'm BAAAA-ACK!

The very clever of you will notice I was gone for my birthday. Well, I spent it in the best way possible, in my bathing suit at the beach with my darling GD. This photo was taken at Paradise Cove in Malibu California.

And lemme tell ya, NOTHING surprises a person like a six layer leaning tower of CAKE! I laughed the whole time they were bringing it over and singing. We did NOT eat all of it, but it was quite delicious. I ended up getting THREE cakes, but more on those later. I have been up since "O-dark thirty" and I am one tired Memere.

One more:

Here is my darling son with his daughter and his favorite quilt that I made. It is Magic Carpet and it is (believe it or not) a scrap quilt (but only in the broadest definition of the word.)

Okay!

More later, a gal of my advanced years needs a lot of sleep to catch up from all the excitement!

Love, Love, Love

My son, his cat, and the Magic Carpet quilt I made. Love, love, love. This picture tells why we make quilts.

Yeah.

I'm So Charming!

Charm quilt:  A charm quilt is typically a one patch quilt where no fabric is used more than once.

THEREFORE:

This is a Charm Quilt. (Magic Carpet)
I feel charming...

This is a Charm Quilt. (Fifty-Eight Carats)
Oh so charming...

This is a Charm Quilt. (Geode)
It's alarming how charming I feel...

All three of these quilts are made with one block (in this case a large diamond) and in each of them, each fabric is used only once.

I love nothing more than strictly adhering to a rule and blasting it to smithereens at the same time.

Sadly, I have been asked if there are patterns for each of these quilts. (Cut large diamonds from 58-65 large prints and then arrange them as desired.)

Yeah, no pattern. Sorry folks.

Sorry, not sorry.



lyrics from "I Feel Pretty" from West Side Story.

Happy Happy!

The packages with Christmas presents arrived in California and here is my granddaughter on the Magic Carpet quilt. As soon as it was unwrapped she curled up into it and then had to look at everything. It's always a good thing when a quilt is loved.  (The OTHER quilt, we know which one that is, will have to wait to be opened at Christmas.)

I found this sled picture frame ornament, and it's perfect for Little Miss's school picture.

 This little guy is my son when he was six. This ornament also hangs on my tree every year.

Fifty-Eight Carats

This is what I'll be sewing together. There are 58 unique fabrics, so I am going to call this quilt Fifty-Eight Carats, because carats is how you measure a gemstone, and a diamond is a gemstone.

For all of you who really want to see differences, here is the first quilt, Magic Carpet, which will be flying to my son and his family later this year.

Dancing Diamonds

While I was at work yesterday I thought about this quilt, and how the first one reminded everybody of overlapping diamonds. Well, I wondered, I hadn't done that on purpose, but how could I do it to THIS one? Idly I wondered if making kind of concentric rings of color might do it. I was pretty sure I didn't have enough different prints to make that happen, and I don't plan to go shopping for more fabric, but I figured I'd try. I had nothing to lose, since I had a good photo of the previous layout.

So I started in the middle. Or more or less the middle, and tried to work outward. I did not move four or five diamonds, or the triangles across the top or most of the ones at the very bottom (those will be triangles, not diamonds), but I moved all the others. Many times.

I kept moving things around, and around, and around. I rummaged through my stash to find prints that were BIG so I could try them in the quilt. In this design, a fabric that is NOT A BIG BUSY PRINT just becomes a wallflower and doesn't do the design any favors. So I kept plugging.

At the end of the night I had this, and I was so brain dead I just couldn't see whether it was an improvement over yesterday or not. I think it might be.

What I found very interesting though, was looking at the thumbnail images of all the pictures of the process I had uploaded to my computer. I could see how the colors and values had moved around, and in the latest version, they actually seem more closely packed.

But even the pictures don't help. The edges get lost because you don't know where the quilt will really end, so I did a camera crop, and this is a lot closer to what the finished quilt will be.

OK, now that I see it this way, I think I'm good. There are a couple of things I want to tinker with (I mean, like, duh!), but you get the drift.

Magic Carpet, finished

It's finished. I'll have to hang it on the quilt rack outside to get a really good straight on picture of it in good light, but for now this will have to do. This quilt was designed in one day from leftover big diamond shapes I had cut out for the diamond quilts I made. I had cut about half the blocks, but as I designed the quilt I raided my stash for more fabrics. There are 62 different fabrics here, and each fabric is used once. There are a few prints that are shown in different colorways. The fabrics were all in my stash. I didn't shop for anything. Had I planned it I probably would have made something a bit smoother and more "regular" but I'm happy with it. Each diamond is 8" across by 16" tall.

This is a big picture, so you can click it to make it bigger and scroll around to see the fabrics in detail. There is one fabric in there, an Alexander Hoffman, that is 35 years old.

On The Flip Side

I've sewn the binding all around the Magic Carpet quilt, so now I have flipped it over and am sewing down the hanging sleeve. There are two more episodes of Country Music still to come. I'm pretty sure I'll always look at this quilt and think of all the music I listened to while I did my hand sewing.



About the bread. Robby, I've been baking bread for over forty-five years. (Wow. That makes me sound ancient.) Anyway, you only need five ingredients to make bread: Flour, for the body of the bread; Yeast, to make the bread rise; a Sweetener (like sugar) to feed the yeast to make it grow; Salt, to regulate the growth of the yeast; and a Liquid to disperse the yeast.

You can also add fat to make the dough more tender. Eggs do this also. Your liquid can be water or milk or yogurt or sour cream or orange juice or even tomato juice. You can add sugar or maple syrup or honey or molasses or whatever the heck floats your boat. You can add seeds for texture: sesame, sunflower, chia, fennel, poppy. You could put nuts in it if you wanted.You can add cheese: ricotta, parmesan, cheddar, asiago or anything else. One of my family's favorites is a cheddar cheese bread with cheddar cheese, parmesan, lots of butter and some hot sauce (really.) It's awesome toasted with ham and mustard.

And no, I do not use a bread machine. I like kneading it with my hands. I can tell when it's ready by the way it feels. And I don't use a timer any more either. I bake it until it smells done.  But hey, I've got 45 years of experience...

a loaf of Challah before baking.

One other note: I've always said that no gift is better than a quilt, but a loaf of homemade bread comes damned close!

English Muffin Bread. Same five ingredients.

When I visit my extended family in Maryland, I often bake bread. I bake six loaves and watch as they literally devour one loaf as soon as it is cool to the touch. Then they promptly (an immediately) devour the second. (There are four kids.) 

They'll eat it plain, with nothing on it. Then again, a good loaf of bread doesn't need any adornment.

Hand Sewing to Country Music

I've had the scrappy diamond Magic Carpet quilt ready for binding now for many weeks, but since I spent much of my vacation time in California, I didn't get it done then. Usually I work on the binding while I "watch" TV.

This week, Country Music, the documentary by Ken Burns, started showing, so I've been sewing the binding on the quilt while I watch it.

See that quilt that is hanging on the wall behind my TV? That's a quilt by my quilting idol, Wanda Hanson, who blogs at Exuberant Color.

I'll tell anybody who'll listen that in my not so humble opinion, NOBODY, but NOBODY in the quilting world knows color like Wanda does. There's a reason why her quilt dominates my living room. It is that good. Wanda is that good.

The Switch

I've packed up the Parade of Zebras quilt for it's trip to the City of Angels, so I put Fruit Loops over the back of the couch. It looks really nice with the yellow pillows.

I've attached the hanging sleeve and the binding to the Magic Carpet quilt. Now I will sew the rest down by hand.


If you want to make a quilt like the one on the back of the couch, you can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop. It's an instant download, so you can get started right away.

When It's Best to Have a Short Memory

When I sewed the binding on the Magic Carpet quilt last month, I got it sewn down on all four sides, and turned over and pinned on all four sides before I remembered I wanted to add a hanging sleeve. Bleh.

There was only one way to fix it.  Fortunately I had not done any hand sewing.

1. Figure out which was the top of the quilt.
2. Unpin the binding
3. Unsew the binding from the top of the quilt.
4. Make the hanging sleeve.

5. Sew it to the top of the quilt
6. Sew the binding on top (or do it all in one step)
7. Pin it over to the front, and then hand stitch it down on all four sides.

I'm up to step five. Woo hoo me!

And the "Short Memory" thing? It's because it's best to forget about making the mistake and just move on.

Of course I had to clean the studio before I had room to work, but hey, that's done!

Binding the Magic Carpet

I was so engrossed watching Dr Jeff on TV last night that I came to the end of the binding of the Parade of Zebras quilt before I even realized it. So that's done, and I'll take it out for some Beauty shots later.

That meant I had to sew the binding on the Magic Carpet quilt, but when I went into the studio this morning before the Men's final at Wimbledon, I realized I had not even made it! So that's what I did.

Now that is sewn on and I can do the hand sewing all around it.


By the way, if you want to know all the details of how and why I sew my bindings to my quilts, you can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop. It's an instant download, so you can get started right away.