Preparing for the Spa

 

My #1 machine has been moved from the studio. It is getting ready for a trip to the Sewing Machine Spa.

It will be gone a week. 

In the meantime I have elevated my #2 machine, my Bernina, to the prime spot in my sewing studio.

I have been digging through my leftovers. Would be kinda fun to figure out a way to put all this stuff together into a fun quilt. Maybe a quilt for the car - for picnics and the beach. Lord knows I have enough stuff...

Will ponder. Will play.

And on another tangent, my Kindle tells me I have read 11 books so far this year. Six weeks into the year? Yeah, that sounds about right. It tells me that LAST year I read 87. And that's only on the Kindle. I know I read at least two physical books in that time.

I read Remarkably Bright Creatures, and can wholeheartedly recommend it. It's the one about the octopus.

Just read it and you'll see. :-)

Back to Pink

Now that the Holiday Banner is ready for quilting, I have to figure out what to do next. I have an idea for a scrap slab triangle quilt rolling around in my head, but I also have the second student bird quilt to assemble and a lot of other stuff to sort through.

Back in September when I took the pink zebra quilt apart I sewed together the leftover pieces into a very interesting design. I had a lot of those pieces left, so I decided to add them to the original chunk. You can see the origin of that here. In the photo above, the original piece is on the left and it's folded so you can only see half of it. The pieces I will be sewing together and adding to it are on the right.

That was great, and I had enough extra pieces to make another section, but both of the new ones had very busy fabrics and I didn't want the quilt to be half one thing on one side and half something else on the other, so I decided to sew each new section on either side of the original chunk.

And this is where I get so caught up in working that I do not take pictures.

So this will be what I sew together. The big piece is in the middle and the new pieces are on either side. It isn't all sewn together because there are only so many hours in the day.

Rotating it 90 degrees, here is another view. The thing is six feet square. Not bad for a bunch of duds.

By the way I am 3/4 the way around the binding on the PRIZM quilt. Should have that done soon. I've binge watched Stanley Tucci's show about Italy an In with the Old about renovating old houses, and I've read the first two of the Secret Scone & Book Society mysteries. I think that's the title.

Anyway.

Those Leftover Diamonds & Update

I got home from work last night and put my dinner in the oven and then went into the studio to start putting the leftover diamonds up on the design wall. I had thought of moving from light to dark so I started at the bottom. But that was just same old same old.

So I turned them on their sides. This was more interesting.

One thing I have learned is that you can't really make any decisions until you can see all the blocks at one time. So I put them all up on the wall, willy nilly.

 Then I set up a plumb line and the laser level and arranged the first row. I wanted to move from dark at the bottom, to light at the top, and I wanted to arrange the blocks by value, and not by color.

I worked my way up.

After about an hour of tinkering, this was the almost final version.

I switched four blocks, then put them back, then replaced two more. This is it. I'll have to fill in the triangle spaces on the sides with something (but it won't be a solid. I don't use solids. It will be a blender of some kind).

Here's the cool part. There are 60 unique blocks, and 60 unique fabrics. All were "leftovers." I didn't cut anything. I used what I had.

I'm feeling very virtuous.

Here, btw, is the quilt in black-and-white, in case you want to see how well I managed the values.