Size Matters

See this chessboard? It is one of the forty I made about eighteen years ago after my son learned chess at college, came home one weekend and asked if I could make him a chessboard. (Well, duh!)

My son took photos of me making the very first one and the photo I use in my blog's header, above.

Pretty sure I've told this story before. I made one, thought it was okay, then made another and improved on the first. Made a third that was much improved, made another one because I wanted one for myself in pretty colors and then had so much fun with them I kept going. (I called them "a symphony in four fabrics.")

Somebody asked a good question the other day, if I would change the quantity of the stripes in these big blocks. Answer = No.

I am sure you are wondering WHY. The size of the rows of this block (2-1/4") is for a very specific reason. When I made the first chessboard for my son, I did a bit of research. It turns out the size of the squares on a chessboard is directly related to the size of the chess pieces. (You can look it up.) 2-1/4" squares were most common. So I made the chessboards with 2-1/4" squares.

 And when I made the chessboard quilt, I used the leftover strip sets. I didn't get all worked up about how I put the blocks together (it was a SCRAP quilt).

I didn't get all worked up about how the blocks went together either. Then as now, I sewed about a third of my triangles into blocks, played with them on the floor, and then cut and sewed blocks I'd need to fit any space I had (a left leaning block with a dark stripe on the bottom).

I didn't get very worked up about how the blocks worked together, and if I had stripes that went across several triangles, that was fine by me. This quilt is big, about 76" x 94" and it is long gone. It is also tied and not quilted, but it lives in the southern US so it's perfect.

I always liked the quilt's inherent rhythm, the size of the blocks and the strips across, so when I resurrected this idea seventeen years later, I kept those basic "design bones."



And yes, I am working on the tutorial for these "Zebra" quilts. It's taking longer than I expected, but then, the world has thrown us all for a hell of a loop.

Now What?

Sorting out the fabric in my stash, I found a lot of stuff I don't particularly like. It's okay, but nothing really special. I know if I put it back in the stash, it'll stay there forever. Most of the stuff was smallish prints or blender-ish, although there are some busier prints.

WHAT could I do with them?

SURE, I could cut them up into chunks and make a scrappy quilt, but that would be boring to do and didn't hold any appeal. If I wanted to use up that fabric, I had to find an interesting way to do it.

HOW could I cut up these fabrics so I could sew them up into something cool?

And then I thought of the quilt I featured in my very first blog post, some ten plus years ago. It was made from scraps.  Sort of.

I cut and paired contrasting fabrics together, then sewed them together...

I cut these up into long triangles.

Here are several pieces I've already cut.

Here are some ideas on putting these together. You can make the stripes line up across blocks, or you can emphasize the contrast. Clearly I'm going to have some fun with this.

To Judy who wondered if I cut something into smaller pieces after fussy cutting something out of a chunk of fabric - oh hell no. If I can fold the fabric back up fairly reasonably, then I do.

To Rebecca who wanted to know how I am keeping on track, the answer is, in small doses. I can only fold so much stuff before I go stark raving mad, so I do some folding and rearranging and then I go do something else.  Now that I have decided what to do with the fabrics I am not in love with, I'll cut strips when I find that stuff, and move on. I am now extra motivated to get the fabric sorting done so I can work on the next quilt with these long triangles.

To the Selvage Fairy, I think I have more than one bird quilt in my future. The New Hampshire Quilt will be a quilt for me and represent anything and everything I like. Family members in it? Not so much. I don't have a table quilt with birds, so with the bird-like fabric I discover as I organize the fabric will probably turn into birds that go into a table quilt.

Disappearing 9-Patch Update

I added a border to the disappearing 9-patch I was working on earlier in the week.
Amazing transformation, isn't it?

**PS, the quilt shown in yesterday's post was first blogged about here. It's my Chessboard Quilt, and I made it from leftover bits of the 40 + quilted chessboards I made several years ago.

Chessboard Quilt

My son came home from college one summer and asked if I could make him a Chessboard. I've been making quilts for years, and I prefer strip piecing, so making him a Chessboard would be pretty simple.

So I made him a quilted chessboard. Then another, and another. In the end, I made forty. Like any good quilter, I kept all the leftover bits. What does a quiltmaker make with leftovers? Another quilt.

I knew I wanted to do something interesting with them, so I decided to make a block in the shape of a long rectangle.I liked the fact that the blocks could be arranged differently.
I sewed about 2/3 of the blocks I needed, with equal amounts of left and right blocks.
Then I started arranging the blocks. At this point, I was able to determine just what I needed, for example, a left leaning block with a wide light strip at the top...
This is the finished quilt.