Pandemic Porch Quilt Show, Days 29 - 33: Flamingos and Hashtags and Adverbs, Oh My!

Day 29: Flamingo Carrom 

This was made in the early 2000's, when my kids, my fabric stash, and I were so young! Also, I was obsessed with Marilyn Doheney's wedge rulers. Despite the frenetic color, and, lordy, the gold lame in the center (what was I thinking?)....

...I still sort of love it. Flamingos and zebras and tigers, oh my! 

Day 30: Frankenquilt! 

The previous project left me a bunch of extra wedges, which I stuffed into my UFO cabinet. About 15 years later, I pulled them out and made the central circle and inner border of this quilt: 

 

The outer borders were more recent experiments in modern hashtag blocks.

I tried to come up with different ways to make hashtags.

This time, I had the sense not to put gold lame in the middle. Just a  nice soothing solid yellow. 

Read more about this quilt in my blog post here.

Day 31: New York State of Mind 

This was my first cityscape quilt, made in 2018, and it happened completely by accident. I was trying to make improv modern ladders. When I offset the tops, skyscrapers appeared! 

I used my trusty Doheney wedge ruler to make the top portion.  The circles and triangles over the wedges create something that looks like a group of diverse people. All happy accidents! The quilting was then inspired by NYC's iconic Chrysler Building. 

More photos in this blog post. The intentional city quilts that followed this quilt are blogged here.

Day 32: "The Road to Hell is Paved with Adverbs"

The quotation is from writer Stephen King, and it's so true! In researching this quilt, I plowed through (adverb) an exhausting yet non-comprehensive list of 3732 adverbs.  

I rubber stamped the adverbs I abuse most, onto pieces of fabric, before piecing and appliqueing everything together.  A closer look is in my earlier blog post, here. 

DAY #33: Seven Sisters Potential Wedding Canopy (Chuppah)

This quilt was made in the '90s, using the technique in the book "Magic Stack and Whack Quilts" by Bethany Reynolds, which was was all the rage - for good reason! Start with large scale print; stack layers, matching printed motifs precisely.

Then rotary cut diamonds - you wind up with multiple sets of 6 identical pieces. When you sew them together, they kaleidoscope, and non-quilting friends declare you a genius! You humbly say, "Aw, shucks," but you and your guild know the truth - even relative beginners can follow this book, have a blast with it, and come up with something spectacular.

The simple-looking bias tape border took MUCH longer (and more skill) than the center.

(There's a "Chai," the Hebrew word for "Life," quilted in gold thread in the corner, but it's hard to see.) I think this quilt would make an excellent, dignified wedding canopy, but no one has asked, so it's still a wedding virgin.

More porch show quilts coming soon!

A "No Apologies" Tutorial for Improv Paper Pieced Log Cabin Triangle Quilts

UPDATE: My book with step-by-step directions for this quilt and its cousins, "Improv Log Cabin Triangle Kaleidoscope Quilts," is available in my etsy shop, here. An on-demand class, which includes the book with this pattern, is here.

When I started this quilt, the idea was to make a rainbow-colored 6-pointed star. I hoped to create a pattern people might use to make a wedding canopy, among other things.  The most relaxing way to do that, I figured, would be to start with log cabin triangles.  

So what you see in the central area of this quilt are a whole lot of log cabin pieced triangles - each center piece is light, and the three "logs" around it are darker. You're also seeing blocks I call "water lilies" - from left to right, the oddball orange, pink and purple blocks, as well as the lavender blocks on the bottom of the photo. These blocks are a log cabin variation, with light triangle corners added.

The problem with log cabin piecing triangles - compared to squares - is that the angles quickly become awkward and confusing, with sharp bias-cut corners. 

That's why I decided to piece all my triangles on clean scrap paper and/or newsprint from the packing store - $6.00 bought me a lifetime supply!  Most triangles were improv-pieced from the top of the paper - stitch-and -flip - with no markings needed on the paper. 

I pieced the water lilies onto scrap paper cut into triangles. Here's how it looked halfway through. 

 Then I stitched lighter colors to cover each corner:

The last step is using my equilateral triangle ruler to trim the excess. (In this photo, I'm doing it on a pink block.) 

My favorite part of this quilt is the six stars in the corners  - spontaneous and irregular piecing makes them vibrate! Here are a couple.

The triangles in the dark outer border are mostly crazy-pieced 

When the quilt reached 67" at the widest by 57" high, still hexagon- shaped, I decided it was finished.  If it were a wedding canopy (a "chuppah" in the Jewish tradition) it would need 6 poles for all the corners!?  Better yet, if someone wants to use this pattern for a canopy, they could sew the top to a square or rectangular background. 

[UPDATE: Several people have suggested that the finished hexagon could be basted to a square of lightweight chiffon. It would create the illusion of a floating hexagon! I love that idea, thank you!]

When it was done, and I counted the number of equilateral triangles, I was astonished. No matter how many times I counted, it kept adding up to 600! How cool is that? Thus the title of this quilt: "Fireflower 600."

Another quilt in this series was shown last week. 

My on-demand class, which includes a book containing directions for making this quilt, is now here.  If you just want the book, it's in my etsy shop, here.

Wedding Gift Season: Challah Cover, Matzoh Cover, and Beyond

I'm working on a large, complicated city quilt; I've been possessed by it, and it's too large to photograph well right now.  But in sanity breaks, I've whipping up Judaica for weddings we've been invited to recently. First, this quilted challah cover, made from fussy-cut stars.  It's 15" square.

Details:

The back is one of my all-time favorite Judaic print - I wish they'd bring it back, I'm running out!

And second, this matzoh cover,which isn't finished yet. The pentagon is English Paper Pieced, using Sewing by Sarah's handy acrylic templates*. I'm crazy about this background fabric, and just can't figure out whether I like this piece more as a square....

...Or as a rectangle?

With a rectangle, more of the fabulous print shows! Your vote counts! 

[UPDATE: The vote - on my blog and social media - was a near tie. So I chose both! I couldn't bear to cut off the excess, so I folded it to the back, and added panels of Passover fabric to create overlapping flaps. Now this gift can be used as a pillow, if the giftee inserts a 14" pillow form - or simply as a matzoh cover!]

The  trompe l'oeil matzoh fabric - so realistic you may want to butter it - as well as the charming Passover fabric above is from 1-800-dreidel.com/. Here's a well-stuffed matzoh ball I made from former fabric: 

It's a truncated octahedron, and the directions are in my polyhedron book. And for 24 more ideas about what to make with matzoh fabric, check out this blog post. It's never too early to start sewing for Passover! 

UPDATE: 

* I have written patterns and directions for Sewing by Sarah, and been compensated for them, but I do not profit from sales of their EPP templates. I did write their free beginner's guide to EPP, that you can download here.

Stitching and Gluing for a Steampunk Wedding: Agony, Followed by Ecstasy

When I first heard that the daughter of a dear friend, Caitlin, and her wonderful fiancé Nathan were having a steampunk/time travel wedding, I was taken aback and began kvetching loudly to no one.

First, because the wedding was in April. Aren't costume weddings for Halloween?

Second, who ever heard of a costume wedding?

Third and the real problem: What would I wear? I have enough trouble shopping for acceptable contemporary attire, let alone swathing myself convincingly in garments of the past.

But then I recognized this invitation for what it was: A stitching/crafting/destashing opportunity. Specifically, to use up my teensy pile of rusted watch gears that I'd purchased years before, when Steampunk first became a thing. I'd paid $10 for maybe a half-gram of old watch parts like this.

My DH is also costume-challenged. It came to me that if I made us couple of Steampunk brooches, they could serve as 98% of our costumes. I mean, we'd go fully dressed in SOMETHING, but the brooches would automatically make us Time Lords (That's a Dr. Who thing.)

I also wanted to give the happy couple something beyond the check. They are such nice people that they would probably thank us sincerely if we gave them yak manure for their garden (if they had a garden). But time travel is such a great theme. Surely I could whip up something from my fabric stash, much of which has travelled over a very long time and distance to reach my house.

I went through my UFO pile and dug up this denim and lace composition, that I'd agonized over last year.

A tutorial for laying down the denim background and auditioning embellishments is in an earlier blog post.  In the last paragraph I grumbled that I didn't know what to do with it.

But now its destiny was clear! Everything on it was vintage: the jeans, the mother-of-pearl  buttons (and some made of ye olde plastick); the intense lace, especially those corner cut-out squares, which make me swoon!

(What were these lace pieces originally intended for? Collars?) Come to think of it,  I convinced myself, the piece was old, new, borrowed and blue - perfect for a wedding gift. 

I felt it needed something more - everything does - so I tried scattering my pile of rusty watch gears over it, but the result wasn't great, and what the heck would people do with a textile that had rusty old things glued to it?  (Don't answer that.)

I dug out my last fragment of a wonderful millenium print fabric, bought in the year 2000, with clocks printed all over it. I cut up some clocks and lined them up in the border. Not bad! I appliquéd them in place with (very modern) invisible thread. 

A little closer: 

A lot closer: 

So easy! So fun! Better present than yak manure! And it ended too soon! But by now my Steampunk pneumatic cylinders were churning. I dug out a circular and and an oval wooden shape, glued batting on top, and covered them with  plaid silk from an old upholstery sample book. I then glued my overpriced watch parts on top. I sprinkled on some buttons, keys and a cool old toy compass for good measure. Glued pins to the back. (Detailed tutorial, see below.) Here's brooch #1, which I wore to the wedding....

And here's #2, which I only took a really bad picture of (sorry), which my husband wore: 

As the wedding wound down, we pinned this one to our gift, as an additional present.  

Along with the brooch, I wore my mother's 1980s-era fringed white cowboy shirt. Thus I was a time travelling steampunk cowperson who was also my own mother (That happens a lot with time travel). My DH wore the other brooch, my mother's trench coat, my Dad's Irish tweed cap, and my daughter's large red bowtie (leftover from her Halloween stint as Dr. Who). He did look Whovian. 

The wedding was an absolute delight.  Any doubts I had about the idea of a costume wedding vanished the moment I set eyes on the bride and groom.

Are they not gorgeous? And it was soooo much fun to see the guests dressed creatively. Some eras were particularly popular. There were a half-dozen Starfleet officers, include the bride's tiny 93-year-old grandmother sporting realistic Vulcan ears, along with her Federation uniform.  She's an interplanetary firecraker! 

The mother of the bride, and several other women wore flapper costumes that they'd cleverly bought on AMAZON! I wish someone had told me that costuming could be so easy! Here's mother and daughter: 

There were gears hanging from the ceilings and strewn on the tables, along with pages from old books. In short, it was waaaay too much fun! Thank you for inviting us, Nathan and Caitlin, and mazel tov to you both! 

Want to make your own Steampunk time traveller's brooch? Start by rounding up all your metal things, ideally old, broken,  and rusty....Don't neglect bobbins. If you don't have vintage embellishments, you can buy fake vintage at the craft store. Here are three small Steampunk-themed wallhangings I made years ago for an online craft swap.

Yes, that's a sewing machine light bulb, a broken bobbin, and some fake gears from Michaels....

A bow made from metal screening....

...A nest made from wire and a fake pearl....and whatnot.

Create a wearable backing. For the wedding, I used wooden shapes, but cardstock, fusible interfacing, or even faux leather or Kraft Tex(TM)  can work.  Cover with batting, and then interesting fabric cut larger than the shape, with edges pulled and glued to the back. Next....

1. Trace around the entire shape onto a piece of faux leather, real leather, or felt....(I really really should have done this before gluing the stuff on it). 

2. Cut out the shape....

 3. Plan the pin location, then mark where the sticky-outie parts are....

 4. Use an xacto knife to cut slits....

 5. Pray while pushing the tip of the pin and then the critical parts through....(sometimes it takes a couple of circles and cuts to get it right)....

 6. Smear glue liberally. Be more frugal as you reach the outer rim.

 Smack that thing on the back!

Let it dry and add glue as needed. Now you are a potential Time Lord, so have fun with your inter dimensional travels!