What's on YOUR bed?

Bonnie is hosting a spur of the moment What's on YOUR Bed? linky party.




Grandma's Donuts has been on my bed since the last time the power went out and took the heat with it. It's not big enough to cover the whole bed, because that was never its purpose. But it layers nicely over our regular down comforter.

I absolutely love having this quilt on our bed. The flannel backing (which started life as a thrift store sheet) is extra snuggly. And, as an added bonus, having it in our room protects it from my boys.

Grandma's Donuts is finally done!

I let this one sit forever before I finally got the binding sewn on. Now my oldest has claimed it because it's "crisp and not broken in yet." Works for me. It'll be safe enough on her bed and she'll get bored with it and return it to me before long.

This is the quilt that made me wonder if I really wanted to buy an AccuQuilt.



Knowing that I traced and cut every last one of those 640 little wedges out by hand makes me feel like I accomplished something huge. Not to mention that it's part of showing off the quilt...I wasn't sure I wanted to give up that sense of satisfaction.

But I don't get any thrill at all out of cutting half square triangles. Those are just a pain. I want to try a couple of variations of drunkard's Path...and apple cores...and tumblers, but I'm not sure when I'll ever have the patience for all of that cutting and tracing.

Start to think about it that way, and the Accuquilt looks very attractive. Start to think about playing with fancy blocks for the charity quilts, and it starts to look even more fun.

I'd planned to buy my by Go! with some money I expect to get later this year, but the Black Friday sale was too good to resist, so instead of gambling that I'd find such a good price later, I decided to get the cutter and wait for the dies.

This is a good plan. I'll finish my UFOs that need a zillion triangles and by the time I do that, I'll know for sure that I still love it. If I buy one die at a time, I'll definitely get the ones I really want and use them all.

I had my wish list all planned out and went to Joann's to add up every single die I could possibly want, not that I expect to wind up with them all. I was just curious. The total came to a little over four hundred dollars.

Then I realized yesterday what the weird shaped triangles that I didn't think I'd possibly want are for. There's one for kaleidoscopes... and one for flying geese... and one that'll do the weird shapes from that quilt I fell in love with in Sisters last summer...

I think I'm going to want a lot of dies.

process

Grandma's Donuts has been waiting for a binding (even though it was my entry to the latest Blogger's Quilt Festival.) I wanted something bright that would go with the front of the quilt, and also with the blue flowered flannel I used on the back. I didn't want to piece the binding of this one, not unless I found a couple of perfect choices that went with each other well.

I'd pretty much decided to just go buy some red Kona, then convinced myself that it wouldn't go with the backing, then thought about blue...

And then we were at the thrift shop buying shirts for ten cents a piece and I found the dress.



It's not an attractive dress. It doesn't have a tag, so I can't be sure if it's a maternity dress or just cut like a circus tent for modesty's sake.

What it has going for it is that it's hundred percent cotton. No, I didn't do a burn test, but I'd be willing to bet on it. And I'm not sold on the the importance of 100% cotton anyway. It feels nice. The blue floral print goes well with the rest of my quilt.

And did I mention that it cost me a dime to bind the entire quilt, with plenty of fabric left to play with?

Not that I couldn't have gone and bought the Kona when I got around to it, but the floral is a better choice for this quilt. And it's a better story. I'm all for attaching neat stories to my quilts.



I've got a couple of movies on the DVR I want to watch tonight, so maybe I'll finish this quilt in 2010 after all!

Blogger's Quilt Festival - Grandma's Donuts

Scrappy antique quilts make my heart go pitty pat, especially the ones with circles. Until I started quilting myself, if I heard the word "quilt," my brain went instantly to great grandma's hand pieced double wedding rings.

One of my quilty weaknesses is old quilt magazines with vague patterns. No careful instructions and illustrations for each step, just a template and a brief bit of instruction to piece the circles and then applique them.

I bookmark hundreds of patterns, promising myself I'll make them someday. This would've been one of those probably-never-to-be-made patterns, except the wedge template looked so small I thought it'd be a great way to use up some strings that were a bit wider than I wanted.

Tracing and cutting the six hundred and forty wedges was not a quick and easy project. Neither was turning under the edges of the circles and pinning themselves into place before appliqueing them down. I thoroughly melted the no-melt mylar template I made to keep them round (and singed my fingertips) before deciding to just eyeball it.

If any of my quilts survive to wind up in an antique shop someday, I kinda hope this is one of them!

Together!

The top is together and not a minute too soon! Now that it's more than a stack of uneven blocks, I have more faith that it'll all work out in the end. I've got a couple of backing fabrics to choose between, then it's on to the quilting. On my Janome, because there's no way I'm trying to square this up for the longarm. Thin batting because the top alone is heavy.

This is the type of quilt that makes my heart go pitty-pat. A single page of extremely vague instructions and lots and lots of scraps. I didn't cut more than eight wedges of any single print, so there are more than eighty different fabrics here.

Bill found an injured hawk lying in the highway yesterday, so we made a very frantic run up to town to deliver her to the raptor rehab lady. The poor little girl had fallen out of her nest and had a head injury. (And I'm sure it didn't help when a stupid woman pulled onto the highway directly in front of us and I had to stomp on the brakes, which jostled all of us.)

I thought about taking a picture, but was so afraid that she wouldn't make it to town that I convinced myself photographing a dying bird would be just too morbid. But after handing her over and hearing that she appeared to be in good shape except for the head trauma, I'm wishing I had. She was gorgeous.

And since we were up there already, we got the van aligned and went to visit the grandparents and stopped at the library and by the time we got home again I did not feel like working on the donuts.

I'm not sure that I ever do feel like working on the donuts unless it's 3am and I'm lying awake in bed, or I'm far from the sewing machine. Last night I didn't feel like doing much of anything, so I set the kitchen timer for an hour and made myself piece wedges. I got my ten blocks done. And seven more this morning.

Twenty nine more to go. I can do this.

I ran out of the white sheet I was using for the background, so I had to cut into another one. It amazes me how fast I go through this stuff. With that last barn sale find, I've got fifty plus yards of white cotton, but I don't expect it to last long.

Progress!

It's actually starting to look like something. By the time I'm done, I'll have twenty of the large circles -- what happened to my not making bed sized quilts?

Now that all of my fabric choices are made, I'm wondering if I should've left the new ones out. I don't think any of them are glaringly different from the scrap bag fabrics, but it could have been all vintage...

Donuts

It feels like a very long time since I started cutting pieces for Grandma's Donuts and made a test block, but the blog says I've only been ignoring my cute little wedges for about four months.



It's not that it's hard to trace and cut them, but picking out the right variety of fabrics and making sure that I'm not duplicating them, or using too much of any one color -- that part always makes me a little crazy.

I want this quilt, badly enough to trace and cut the same shape 640 times. I can definitely see the appeal of those die cut machines! But I'm down to my last forty wedges, scrambling for those last few fabric choices.

The piecing, I hope, will go a lot more quickly.

And because I know I'll lose my magazine long before I'm done, here are the details -- it's the Grandmother's Donut Quilt from Traditional Quiltworks (Issue #30, March 1994), the finished quilt should measure 64"x80" and the blocks are 16" square.

Life has me frazzled.

If I didn't make the time to start a new quilt today, I was going to wind up locked away in a nice quiet room somewhere. It's not the frazzled part that's the problem, it's been the lack of fabric-y playtime to balance it out.

For the past few days, I've been drafting quilts in my head, trying to figure out how many two inch strips it will take to make the log cabin blocks the same size as the applique chicken blocks, and which way to twist them to make things line up the way I want them to, and what that might look like with different fabric combinations.... but I can't do that in my head, so all I succeed in doing is making myself long for time with actual fabric.

One of the blocks I've been playing with in my imagination is this one:



The magazine pattern is called Grandma's Donuts and those wedges are itty-bitty. Just the right size to cut from the strings in my bin that seemed to wide and clunky for string quilts. I was reasonably sure that I could piece the wedges, but not how (or if) I was going to be able to applique them to the background squares. The pattern itself doesn't offer any suggestions, just "applique."

I got my quarter circle close enough to the right shape, pressed the raw edges under, machine zig zagged it to the background, and am reasonably happy with the results. Now I get to trace around the template a zillion more times to cut a zillion more wedges.

I'm actually looking forward to it.

The "loose ends" list is getting shorter -- I managed to cross off three projects the first week and make progress on most of the rest.

This quilt now has a binding and I'm even more in love with it than I was before.



Isn't it amazing what you can do with a bunch of 2 1/2" squares, a pattern from an old library book, and the desire to see if you can actually make that quilt?

I also finished the Marilyn apron. Four bucks for the fabric, which I love, and nine bucks for the pattern, which didn't live up to my hopes and expectations, even though I read through it before deciding to splurge on the thing.

I'm kinda wishing I hadn't cut up the fabric. Or, better yet, had bought a lot more of both colors.