Small Quilt Play Date!

I took yesterday off for a play date with my friend Mary and her friend Shirley! What fun we had! You know it's crazy....I've been working so hard on the book quilts, who would have thought that I would want to SEW all day on my day off? But it's true. It was a switching of gears from what was work....to what was relaxing with no deadline. DH and son don't understand it, but I'm sure you all do :c)

Have you ever had the experience of walking into someone's home, and feeling like you just walked into the midst of Country Sampler or Country Living magazine? That is what it is like when I visit Mary's house. She has such a knack for little vignettes and details that her house takes my breath away. I love going there. She hasn't seen MY house yet, and I'm almost embarrassed to have her over because while her house is Vintage Beautiful, my house is Country Clutter Chaos! *LOL* She has a definate FEEL to her various rooms, mine is just a jumble of everything...kind of like my quilts. Completely scrappy with no thought to fabric genre or whatever.

I am in love with little quilts, yet every quilt I make tends to come out gigantic. WHY? I'm not sure. At first I thought it was because it would help me use up the scrap stash quicker. But that is a false assumption! It just takes more little quilts to use the same amount of fabric, but you get more variety!

SO. Yesterday's challenge was to reel myself back and to make SMALLER things to use in decorating, on top of tables or to hang on walls, to stuff in baskets, to put here and there for a bit of quilted color. I had a blast!

I nearly finished THREE tops by the time it was time to leave! THREE! Weeee..how fun is this?? I had brought my big zipper baggie of 1.5" strips. I wanted to deplete some of them. There were parts of UFOs in that bin too, left over rail fence blocks, left over strip pieced units from something else (Red 3.5" center with two light 1.5" strips sewn on either side? What WAS I making with that? I don't remember!).

The first thing I did was just LAY out these ugly rail fence blocks together. They m ust have been ugly cast-outs from another project. They were very limited in the color selection, not a great variety, very old fabrics, and there is this one HUGE Kaffe-Fassett-Esque turquise print that just did NOT play nicely with the others. Mary said..

"Never fear! Just sew them together and then we are going to TEA DYE the sucker to death."

Okay. I sewed! And in no time I had the center done!

This morning I just could STILL NOT just leave this alone without doing something to tie it together better. I added a narrow gold inner border. I sewed a gazillion triangles together from the bonus triangle bin, and then I added the final black border. You know one great thing about loving primitive quilts? You kind of WANT the seams not to always match perfectly. And it's okay if you piece a bunch of triangles for the border and just cut them off wherever the border ends.

Yeah...it got BIG, Mary! BUT...it looks good on my kitchen table!

It can still be stuffed in a basket or displayed on a wall. And I'll still use your idea for tea dying it to tone down those white on white prints that I don't like. While I'm at it, I think I'll grab ALL the white on whites and cream on creams that are still left in my stash and tea dye THOSE too. I really don't use them anymore....other than to print labels on. I don't like the paint on them.

The next Little Ditty I did was to simply sew panels of 1.5" strips together! I made subcuts at 1.5" and 2.5" and just stitched the units together in rows. How SIMPLE can this be? I love this one. Mary handed me a cast off blue plaid and I slapped in on right then and there for a border. CUTE! Finished size? 24"X29" This is the smallest quilt I've made in a LONG time! But wait...


This one isn't much bigger! 26"X32"! Remember those 3.5" red squares that had 1.5" light strips sewn to either side? I cut those into 1.5" sections and used them to frame scrappy 9-patches! I had it all the way into rows by the time I left Mary's last evening. Today all I had to do was sew the rows together and border it. Since my kitchen is going to have barn red walls...this one is for display in there...and remember that old saw that I bought at the Liberty Antique festival? I think I'm going to hang the saw, blade up...and hang the quilt on it...yep..in the kitchen! Special thanks to Mary for donating the sashing fabric to me from her stash. What are friends for? :cD

I got home by 7pm, and I was SLEEP by 7:30. Total wipe-out! But it was such a fun day.

Today I'm getting all the quilt instructions together for the two workshops I'm teaching this weekend. Today Buddy goes back to the vet..hopefully TODAY the cast comes off. Last week's checkup showed that he just wasn't read yet.

Tomorrow I'm off to Beautiful Maggie Valley NC, on the outskirts of the Smoky Mountains. Thursday night trunkshow/lecture, Friday Boxy Stars workshop!

As soon as the workshop is over, I head out to Pickens, SC where I am attending their guild retreat, teaching the Pineapple Blossom workshop. The best part...I get to retreat with them on my own stuff friday night...saturday after the workshop into saturday night..and most of the day Sunday until it is time to come home. How FUN is this? The retreat is being held at Table Rock Wesleyan Camp in Pickens, SC. Gorgeous!! I can't wait.

I'm toying with the idea of bringing the 1.5" strips..seeing what else I can make out of them, but at the back of my brain is that Storm At Sea brown dear jane thing..that only needs me to put the rows together and finish paper piecing the borders to get it DONE?! What to do..what to do?????