Odds and Ends

Still looking for the camera, darn those "safe" places. When I die, the kids are going to have a tough time figuring out why I put things where I put them. But the quilt is completely done and ready to take on the trip home. What else has been going on..... oh, last weekend, Mae finally reminded Bill on the weekend about her ceiling fan (instead of reminding him on a Monday). So we picked out a new fan for her room and proceeded to replace the old with the new. First, the electricity had to be turned off, but the switches at the box aren't labelled very well. There was much hollering up and down the stairs - "that one? ..... NO!...... that one?...... NO!" Finally got the right power turned off and proceeded to follow the "easy installation". Ha! That is a flat out misinterpretation of the word "easy", that's all there is to say about that. End of story. 4 hours later, Mae has a working ceiling fan again.

Wednesday, Steven and I went on what I think may be the last college visit. This one was to the University of Delaware. It was about 2 and a half hours away, but involved getting on the Turnpike and 95, which was really blech. Traffic was not lovely. It was even worse coming home. Bumper to bumper at 7 PM. When do those people get home??? Anyway, it was a great visit, the school seems really nice, the campus was lovely, and Steven has rated it as his #2 choice. He's still adamant that he wants to apply early decision to Virginia Tech. We'll be there in a few weeks moving Will back in, and Steven can get one last look before working on his applications.

What else? Oh, I kinda sorta got back into the Singer featherweights. Laura asked me to find one for a friend, and I got carried away on Ebay. Now I have 7. I'll put the rest up for sale at Kindred Quilts after I've given them their tune-ups and whatever repairs were needed. What was I thinking??? I'll be working on those all weekend.

One-Block Wonder - Getting started

I'm using this book as a guideline to making my own one-block wonder quilt. The book has pretty clear instructions, and the photo illustrations are really good. The technique isn't new by any means (anybody remember Stack and Whack by Bethany Reynolds?!) and it uses a ton of fabric, but at least it's just ONE fabric. And there's the beauty of it - one fabric that produces a hundred different blocks. You'll see. Follow along with me.....

The fabric I'm using isn't what I would have picked out for myself since I'm not much of a fan of black backgrounds. But I chose this particular fabric with an eye toward my parents' new condo - I think the black with touches of reds, yellows, greens and a hint of blue will go in their new great room really well. I can almost ALWAYS count on finding what I'm looking for at my local quilt shop (Kindred Quilts). Take a good look at the fabric - when it's all said and done, you'll never know that was the base of it all.

The following is going to be really abbreviated, for the whole, entire, complete she-bang, you really will have to get the book! The first step is to find the repeats in the pattern of the fabric and, to make hexagons, you'll need to cut 6 (some icky math : hexagon = 6 sides) sections of the fabric. This is why you need some major yardage - I used a little over 4 yards. Carefully stack the 6 sections on top of each other. Use pins to line up the edges by pinning through the exact same place in all six sections. This is the real pain in the butt part - time-consuming, and nitpicky. Haste makes waste. 

Now that the sections are pinned on all four sides, I carefully lay this out on the cutting board and make the first cut to trim up one edge. I only cut about 1/2". Then I make the first, gulp, real cut. It's a 3 and 3/4" strip from selvage edge to selvage edge. Put a couple pins in the large section and cut another strip.

Laying one strip out on the cutting board, I used my equilateral triangle (icky math alert: all 3 sides are equal) ruler and cut the triangle sections out. I have to take the time to pin each section together - after all, I'll have... hmm, I didn't count, but surely more than 70 of these sections, and I sure would hate to drop them and they get all mixed up!

I felt like peeking at a couple of the sections. I fanned four of them out to see what the final image will look like.

Now that's inspirational!! I can hardly wait - each one of the triangle sections cut from 6 strips will be a slightly different version.