My First Tumbler Quilt! (Not Tumbling Blocks)

First, in case you are as confused as I was, a "Tumbler" quilt is  completely different from a "Tumbling Blocks" quilt! 

"Tumbling Blocks" are made from 60 degree triangles and diamonds, and wind up with a 3D effect. They're great fun to look at, but technically can be a bear to make. I don't even remember how I pulled off the blocks below, from a Tokyo-themed quilt I made in the 90s, called "Sushi in the Sky with Diamonds." 

I must have had a much higher tolerance for mitering in those days. On that same quilt, I also threw on some hollow tumbling blocks, carrying little passengers cut from Japanese fabric. 

But in three decades of quilting I never made a much easier-looking "Tumbler" quilt, whose patches are shaped like - guess what kind of glassware? 

Until now! Here it is. Made as part of my emergency response to the massive baby tsunami happening among my family and friends since the Covid era began.

What made this quilt possible was a wonderful craft thrift shop, Remainders, in Pasadena, California, which has every kind of fiber art notion from the past 50 years. Remainders sells them at such reasonable prices that if I don't like it, I just donate it back to them to sell again! It's like a lending library of sewing stuff!

Specifically, I found this:

It's Marti Michell's "One-derful One-Patch Templates" They're $23 new at Joanns, but half that price at other retailers (which makes the price only a few dollars more than I paid at Remainders.) 

You may ask, "Why would I need to buy a Tumbler template when I can perfectly well cut a tumbler shape out of a Cheerios Box?" And I asked myself the same question. Then I tried it, and my newly-educated answer is, "This template rocks!" 

First, it's thick acrylic, so unlike a cereal box, you won't trim it with each piece you cut. Second and more mysteriously compelling: The template has these two little jogs in the lower outer corners, on the wider end. Look closely at that bottom right edge in the photo above - the template is not quite straight there. 

When you cut the shape with these slight extra angles, they piece together much more cleanly than if they didn't have the extra angles. If you understand why, please explain it to me!

UPDATE! Several alert readers have explained it to me - Tumblers have strange little dog ears. Reader mary greene (who doesn't capitalize her name) sent me to this tutorial by Nancy Zieman. If you scroll down to the section titled "Construction," the third photo below that subtitle, you see the tiny dog ear on the bottom right that's created if you don't have a shaped template. Because Michell's template has you trim that first, the pieces' alignment is less confusing! By the way, mary has a hilarious blog, where her favorite post is "Two Dog Shirts for 50 Cents," here. 

I also found many of the fabrics for this quilt from Remainders,  of course supplemented them with pieces from my own exhaustive, exhausting, library of novelty prints.  

I debated whether to include popcorn (upper left in photo below), since it's a baby choking hazard, but hopefully by the time the baby is old enough to comprehend a picture of popcorn, they will be old enough to safely eat some. Also, the parents could lie and claim they're floating yellow teddy bears.

Every baby quilt should include mooses (above left).

Below, the back. I like putting fabrics that I don't have the heart to cut up into small pieces on the back.

I decided to give the back an astrophysics, fish and pet theme. 

My great debate with myself with this quilt was whether to leave the sides zig-zag, or cut the edges even, thereby losing half of each outer side row. And speaking of pets, my grand-cat assisted me in scrutinizing this important issue closely.

I finally decided to leave the zigzag sides. I cut the binding from bias. At the four corners, I turned the bias the exact same way as for a regular 90 degree corner. And for the gentle ins and outs on the sides, there was no need to take the quilt out of the machine. Just stop on each outermost and innermost point, needle down, and swivel to the next direction, turning the bias along with the rest of the quilt. It's surprisingly easy! 

Tumbler quilts do take a little more time than square-based baby quilts - but with a sturdy-yet-mysterious Marti Michell template, they're relatively fast and a lot of fun. (No financial affiliation). I'll hold onto my new favorite template for a while and see what babies come along next! 

A Funny Thing Happened on my Way to a Vaccination Quilt

Here's what I just made, instead of a quilt

There are two immutable quilting laws that correspond to Murphy's law: (1) Your bobbin is low; and, (2) Anything that can look like a phallic symbol, will.

The latter law kicked in when I decided I needed to make a quilt that would encourage people to get vaccinated.  I'd been thinking a lot about about friends who struggle with needle phobia, but desperately want a vaccine. I admire their courage, and want to thank and encourage them and others.

Would it be possible to make a quilt with friendly-looking hypodermics? I started by reviewing photos online.  I did some drawings, like this one.

The vertical lines on the lower image show that I was testing whether I could turn this into a Foundation Paper Piecing (FPP) pattern. But it was way too complex. Also, ideally, I wanted a pattern that could be improvisational (I have a measuring phobia). 

I also thought it might be fun to arrange needles in a circle - which meant wedge-shaped needles.

All those thoughts led to this: 

About 30 of them could turn into something like this: 

It looked good in my graphic design program! But when I made a couple,  I wound up with...

Swords. Carrot Swords. You know, carrots with sword-shaped handles, like vegetarian Vikings used. (None were found at archeological sites, because they composted).

Back to the drawing board. Clearly, hypodermic chambers are unrecognizable when wedge-shaped. I changed the pattern to make the body a rectangle, but with long narrow background (white) wedges on both horizontal sides). I FPP'd one.

First run:

I screwed up the long white edges there - they should have been longer. Worse, with the tiny pieces, this was no fun, and I wouldn't want to make 5, let alone 30.

So forget the wedges - I was back to rectangles, simplified further.

Instead of FPP these, I measured and cut fabric strips for each piece, and chain pieced them to make these: 

I did mess up the grey placement on the handles (the dark greys should form an intact H, not a broken one.) But that was okay, I told myself - the weird handles looked kind of artsy  To solve the bigger problem of needles being too thin to piece, I planned to embroider a line of thick floss, emerging from each tip, shooting across the white rectangle.

Are you sensing where this is going? When I put this collection up on my design wall....

I'm sorry. I cannot NOT see phallic symbols here, inexplicably linked to broken letter "H"s (or "I's"), for some kind of profound statement on ego and sexuality.

Argh! I thought long and hard (no pun intended) about what I wanted to say, and then I went back to my graphics program and made the meme at the top of the page. I don't think any of the needles it depicts could be construed as X-rated unless your mind has been hopelessly sullied by reading this blog post. 

I don't know if I'll ever turn these scraps into a vaccination quilt. Maybe a Viking quilt?

Masked Hexagons, Part II: A English Paper Piecing Variation

Help!

I'm going nuts making masks! 

These are a few of my new masked hexagons, made from the scraps of face masks I've been sewing since March. In my last installment, here, I described how I made these hexies, using conventional English Paper Piecing techniques. At the time, I had only made about 35 hexagons. 

Since then, I've made many more masks to donate. So here's the finished quilt, with a total of 79 masked hexagons, all socially distanced. 

UPDATE: The digital pattern for this quilt is now for sale on Etsy, here. All money raised from this $1.99 pattern will go to my Los Angeles Regional Foodbank fundraiser, here. 

Here are some of my new favorite masked hexagons. The "faces" are cut from assorted solids; and the "mask" prints are from my vast stash of mostly novelty fabrics that I used in actual masks. Here's a bit of casino fabric that a friend gifted me.

The (mostly) round button eyes give them a startled look, appropriate for a pandemic. (Pandemic Pat?)

While making masks, I discovered that I own TWO radish fabrics. 

And numerous cat fabrics. This cat looks bored. 

Mighty Mouse intends to triumph over covid. The patriotic buttons almost look like eyes with red-and-white eyeshadow.

The red vintage paisley below is only nice in small doses.

Yes, that's matzoh fabric. 

Rainbow triangles go with everything.

A dandelion print reminds me that things more benign than viruses can blow in the wind.  

This awesome fabric features quilters' rulers:

Harry Potter is recognized universally as a symbol of meeting catastrophe with a great deal of anxiety (but triumphing anyway).

A truly horrible brown rose print made a remarkably nice mask for a hexagon. 

Bars - horizontal, or on an angle - keep the hexagons socially distanced. 

This next fabric -  the star - was from a print featuring Spongebob.  

A 1970's era flannel. So soft  and comfy. 

For quilting, I surrounded the masks with quilted covid viruses, and hypothetical pathogen-laden swirls. 

On the white area, I made more emanations

Again, the digital pattern for this quilt is now for sale on Etsy, here.

For a much simpler version of this quilt on a smaller scale, check out my previous post, here. 

Of course, I have hexagons and English Paper Piecing on my mind because my new book was just published by Landauer, Hexagon Star Quilts: 113 English Paper Pieced Star Patterns to Piece and Applique, available from Amazon (here) and wherever fine quilting books are sold! 

My mask-making resource page is HERE. Find my simple pleated mask pattern HERE. My roomy mask pattern is HERE.