Tag: stay at home

Posted in quilting

Another Round Robin Quilt Challenge

Posted on by Laura Kate

Quilting Gail is at it again! She has organized five of her quilting friends in a stay-at-home round robin quilt for 2022. I’ll not go into details about how it all works. Instead, I’ll recommend that you check out Gail’s blog.

https://quiltinggail.com/2022/01/10/sahrr-2022-getting-started-center-block/

Last year was a blast for me. I was greatly challenged to expand my quilting skills. In the end I loved what I made. Its success was due in a big way to the weekly challenges, requiring me to stretch my imagination while improvising my design.

Expanding Universe lap quilt, made during the 2021 SAHRR quilt challenge.

I have an unconventional approach for this year. It will involve quilting together hand-woven vintage fabric samples that have been entrusted to me by my daughter. Here is my center block using three samples. It will have finished size of 12 inches square.

In addition to the wonderful textures of the weavings, this block cements together a split complimentary color palette utilizing red-orange as the primary color with blue and green as the supporting colors. Below are pictured more pieces, which will illustrate the palette clearly.

If this type of project interests you and you want to see more center blocks, check out the co-hosts’ posts, here.

Posted in quilting

Goose Purgatory

Posted on by Laura Kate

It’s Week Four on the Stay at Home Round Robin. The prompt is Flying Geese block.

In the beginning, I was happy and excited. The flying geese block is one that I have never made, so this was going to be my opportunity to try it out. I had what I believed to be a good concept for this round. So what could go wrong?

I decided to make my geese 2 by 4 inches. To make it work, I needed to bring the quilt sides up to 24 inches. I sewed on a narrow border of flowered batik fabric.

This also helps to define the pale blue octagon – a secondary shape.

To get started with the Flying Geese, I viewed this video by Patches and Poodles for making them four-at-a-time.

4-at-a-time Flying Geese Tutorial (with video!)

Her instructions were crystal clear. On Tuesday I made the first group.

These looked just great. I calculated that I would need 12 units per side, for a total of 48. The realization of the quantity and time required gave me pause. I decided to get started the next day.

Today, I started by cutting lots of squares and sewing them into shapes using the technique I had learned on Tuesday. Soon I had quite a collection of geese.

Here they are sewn and pressed

The last step is to trim them to size. That’s when things started to go side-ways.

It seems that all of my lovely geese, over which I had labored for two hours, were 1/4 inch too small!!!!!!!! I had skipped over the instruction about pressing the seams open. Missing this step was enough to throw off the measurement that critical 1/4 inch. Thus began another three or four hours of re-working my flock of geese………………

By dinner time, I had managed to salvage about twenty -four goose blocks. A day has been spent and I am only half way done, with a wad of unworkable blocks left behind.

So I am bowed, but not beaten. I will go back into the fray tomorrow, starting with more fabric and a fresh rotary blade.