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Acid Trip Quilt Top DONE!

10/27/2022

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It's too heavy to stay up on the design wall, so I have draped it over the table... which means you'll have to take my word for it that it's quite nice!  Ha ha!  However, I am too delighted to wait for a perfect picture to post.  So here we have the Acid Trip quilt top, finished, pretending to be a tablecloth:
Picture
Now I need to have it quilted.  I have decided that the black pieces need to be quilted with stripes that mimic the stripes they would have if they were pieced like the colorful ones.  That means paying the long-armer to do custom quilting.  So it will have to wait until I have more money!  But it's ready to go as soon as my finances permit!

Previous posts for this project:

First post, about string piecing
Second post, about patterns as the blocks are tiled
Third post, about the layout
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Scrappy Double Wedding Ring Quilt

10/26/2022

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Picture
Closeup of quilt stitched in mid-20th century, United States.. by Downtowngal, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Deep down, I just hate wasting things.  I have all my scraps, even little pieces, organized by color, and it gives me pleasure to collate them into something beautiful.  And the so-called "scrappy quilt" is always a fun option! 

Quilters use the term "scrappy" in a variety of ways, sometimes to mean "made from scraps" or "made from a variety" or "made from random picks without planning color or organization". 
For me, the defining feature of a scrappy quilt is that I use-up scraps of fabric I already have, rather than select and acquire fabrics on purpose for a theme, color scheme, or design. 
My recent Acid Trip quilt having used up nearly all of my long strips of scrap, I just have smaller pieces left, and a desire to use what I can and throw out the "crumbs" -- anything less than 2 inch square.  (I don't have the patience for crumb quilting!)  Moreover, I really enjoyed foundation piecing to make Acid Trip, so I seek another pattern I can do the same way.  The Double Wedding Ring pattern (example above) appeals, because I can foundation piece my scraps onto the "melon slices" and go from there. 

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Starting a Hunter's Star Quilt

10/21/2022

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The Hunter's Star is a simple, oddly composed block, which creates stars at its intersections with other Hunter's Star blocks.  There are actually several ways to make this block.  Deb Tucker mentions several of them here, before talking about her method.  As I see it, the various ways can result in only two final block options, which I illustrate below.
Picture

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Poppy Scarf

10/13/2022

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Remember those halcyon pre-pandemic days, when a person could frivolously waste rubbing alcohol instead of using it to sanitize things?  Remember my scarf-dyeing and doodling project?  Well, it's time to get inspired by blank silk canvasses again! 

This project was done in three steps: draw, soak, and detail.  First I drew the flowers on a fold, then I soaked the whole scarf in alcohol to make the ink run and transfer from fold to fold (it didn't work very well), then I detailed the fuzzy outlines to make the whole, symmetrical picture. 
Picture

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Collecting Scraps & Getting Ideas

10/7/2022

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I've written before about the book Cut the Scraps!, by Joan Ford:
The book's premise is simple and smart: take your small scraps of quilting cotton, anything under a fat quarter, and cut them into a set of prescribed sizes: 2" squares, 3.5" squares, and 5" squares.  Sort these squares by value rather than by color, so you end up with a pile of lights, a pile of darks, and a pile of everything in the middle.  If you make a four-patch with four 2" squares, it makes a 3.5" square; if you make a nine-patch with nine 2" squares, it makes a 5" square.  Then the book has instructions for twenty different quilts which can be made from squares of those sizes.  I love the idea! 
(from my second Acid Trip post)
What I didn't mention was that I also "cut the scraps" in the same sizes.  Do I have enough scraps to make something?  I certainly have enough scraps to speculate!

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Noshi Motifs in Kimono

10/3/2022

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Picture
Today's post is a bit of a dive into the sea of Japanese history and symbology, in search of the story behind this motif on a kimono. 
This pattern is called "noshi".  But what is it? What are those yellow strips?  Why are they tied together? 

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    Karen Roy

    Quilting, dressmaking, and history plied with the needle...

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