Wow!
Have you ever taken a creative workshop and felt overwhelmed and out of your comfort zone not always understanding what the next step is…? You should! It’s liberating and amazing things happen.
Well, I mean, I took Joe the Quilter’s Rock the Block workshop and made some nifty things happen. With a late start, I had to jump in & catch up right away… did I mention that I still needed to choose fabric? Ah, indecisive am I?
Finally, I’m inspired to start a new quilt for myself.
I’d been reflecting on my favorite Gramma-Great quilt: the pink and white Carpenter’s Wheel block. All those diamonds are so enticing! However, I’m not ready to attempt Y-seams just yet. As luck would have it, my colleague pointed me to the magic-8 method for making half-square triangles and from there I searched how to assemble the block using these triangles instead of diamonds.
Last year, I purchased fabric without any intended project. I’d stumbled upon a delicate birdie print that I used for the wheel plus two coordinating solids.
What better project to post on Christmas Day than a fabulous reversible stocking that I figured out how to make from various posts on Pinterest.
My BAM Secret Santa project turned out great! Here are the fronts:
And one to go!
Select fabric for the Secret Santa gift (holiday stocking)? Check! Design an alternating block pattern of reindeer fabric? Check! Fussy-cut star strips for aforementioned blocks? Check! Engine trouble? Check!
Scotty: Captain, I don’t know how much more emergency power we can take before we start to break up.
While I knew that my great grandmother was an avid quilter, I hadn’t seen her handiwork in many years. On a recent visit with my mother, she pulled out several quilts that I easily remembered from childhood. Here’s one that was on my parents bed.
It’s called Carpenter’s Wheel.
This seems to be a favorite block design. Using two colors make a flat block, but with the large ‘corner’ triangles around each block, the background seems to change. This quilt is especially amazing because it’s hand pieced & hand quilted. We have several more in various fabric combos and it’s interesting to note differences.
This month’s installment of BAM-alot Blocks found me hunting up the longest pieces of solid fabric for creating borders. I didn’t have any of the new fabric additions, so I thought I’d use the original purples and gray prints. Perhaps I could echo the pie slices in the corners and use colorful squares-on-point along the edges. I also toyed with triangles.
But for some reason, that hypnotizing circle fabric was too overwhelming. Maybe a good solid could contain its energizing powers. The purple seemed dull, but there were two possible reds, one burgundy and one hot pink. Guess which one I liked?
Every once in a while, I am intrigued by a Quilty speaker and take the workshop at the last minute.
That’s what happened this month. I fell in love with a batik fabric pack, bought some curvy templates and took Judy Sisneros’ Circle Pizzazz workshop.
What a treat to learn curved piecing at the 
foot of a master. With fabulous tips and tricks she led us by the hand until we each had created a block. Her technique (make the first ring block, then cut it up and assemble the second block) reminded me of a color class I took in college where the professor had us make 2 simple watercolors in contrasting colors, and then told us to cut them up and weave them together. Scary! But it worked so beautifully. This pretty one is mine:
For this Marin Autumn Retreat, I took another weekend trip to Tie-Land.
Working with the last blue shirt and two-dozen ties, I used the ‘string block’ method to make a four blocks for the pillow top and plan four solid blocks out of wool trousers for the backside.
My goal is to complete 8 pillows, so I’ll need to cut the last 23 ties very judiciously to make this work. 
With the long weekend, I’m contemplating my addition options for the round robin block. It’s déjà vu because my friend & I split a long strip-pieced fabric swatch for our starter blocks. I’m working on hers with a couple months of borders. Here’s my chosen color palette.
I’m looking forward
to reintroducing purple. My other quandary is how to work with the trapezoid shape. I could square it up & turn it on point. I do like it much better with less green, but I’m not ready to cut it yet.
For this installment of BAM-a-lot Blocks, I have a fun, stripe-n-square block that was last bordered only on two sides. My choice of fabrics included colors I thought would meld (orange and plum) as well as a bright teal and lime, plus an orange mandala print that’s similar to the multicolored small print already in the piece.
My first thought is to bookend half a mandala on 
each side, however, that seems a little too expected. Since it shines like a sunset sinking into a brilliant azure sea on the dusty purple horizon, I place it on the ‘top’ border centering it on the vertical and ponder the left half of the equation. Continuing the stacked blocks might work, but I decide to echo the stripes instead and save the blocks for the right side. I’m running out of that plum for the bottom. There’s just enough, with an orange squeaked in there to finish one last strip.