Every time I try to work on this Feathered Lone Star quilt with the bird embroidery, I am forcibly reminded of Candy Goff’s Misery Quilt. You must go read that story. Don’t worry, I’ll be here when you get back.

Now, my quilt started innocently enough, really, about three or four years ago. I wanted to make something different, but small-ish, to enter into the AQS show that year. Life got in the way, and the pieces are still sitting here waiting for me to put them together. I pulled it all out earlier this year to see what I could do with it, and maybe finish it up for the Houston show this year. I wanted to do something a little different with the setting, and the only fabric I had that I liked, I didn’t have enough of. (How this could be, when I have this much fabric in my house, is beyond me!) I carried all the parts with me to the States when I went to the Diane Gaudynski workshop in Paducah, and looked in every quilt shop we could find between Nashville and Paducah, but couldn’t find any more of what I really wanted, nor could I find something else to substitute that I really liked.

After I came home and I started thinking about selling my Pfaff embroidery machine so I could get the Bernina 440, I had a sudden inspiration about this quilt, and decided I wanted to put machine embroidery in the setting squares around the star, which meant that if I sold the Pfaff, I’d have to get the embroidery unit for the Bernina 440 right away if I wanted to do this quilt. I made that happen, and did test stitch outs of all the birds I wanted to use, purchased more thread, and things were just clipping along, except for the missing fabric, of course. I did finally settle on something else that’s a different color, but it gives the same effect so it’ll probably work out okay. I got all the birds done, and I put the whole kit and kaboodle up on the design wall to see if it was going to really work. I had cut the curvy pieces to fuse to the outside edges of the bird blocks, and thought I liked the way it looked. I fused all the pieces, then had second thoughts. And third thoughts. And then I didn’t like it at all. Read the rest of this entry »

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I finally got around to moving my two tall shelves full of tone-on-tone fabrics today, with ITMan’s help. As I was loading the folded fabrics into laundry baskets to move it downstairs, I thought it might be interesting to weigh it, just for curiosity’s sake. So one laundry basket full weighed about 35 pounds, and I had six baskets from those two shelves. I also have about three more baskets full of all my print fabrics in another dresser. Then there are the eight Rubbermaid tubs of fat quarters, which I estimate might fill up one more basket full. I realize that there’s probably quite a bit of room for error here, and this is not all uncut yardage, either. Oh, and there are some bags of true scraps around as well not included in this total.

Oh dear. I’m not sure I really want to know how much that might be in yards, but here goes: That comes to 10 baskets full, times 35 pounds per basket, for 350 pounds. I weighed a one yard piece of fabric, straight off the bolt, and it comes in at 4.5 ounces. So then you multiply 350 pounds by 16 to get the total ounces, and divide by 4.5, for a whopping 1,244 yards!!! WOW! I think that’s it for the math today, because I’m absolutely not going to think in dollars about all that. Um, can you say fabric diet???

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Puzzle Quilts,
by Paula Nadelstern

Actually, this book hasn’t even been on the bookshelf yet, since I just got it! I finished devouring it yesterday while I waited for my daughter at her flute lesson. I love it! It’s just so yummy that devouring is the perfect word!

This new book by Paula Nadelstern is the first new quilt book I’ve purchased in a long while, and I’m happy to report that it was a completely satisfying purchase. I have her other two books, Kaleidoscopes & Quilts and Snowflakes & Quilts, and to be honest, while the books are stunning visually, and her methods and techniques are interesting and produce exciting quilts, I’m just not sure I’d ever really make a quilt like that. I’ve looked at those two books a lot, but I’ve never been inspired enough to go there (yet).

Puzzle Quilts, however, may just be a different story altogether. I know I read the other two books (I mean really read them, not just perused them), and they just didn’t strike the same chord of inspiration, the “I want to make something with this method NOW” burn. Read the rest of this entry »

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