Friday, April 9, 2010

Crossroads


I am at the point on the string pinwheel quilt where all the blocks are sewn together, pressed, and laid out on the floor. Hoo doggies, this is a busy quilt! This is just a sneak peak--the final reveal, with any luck, will be next week--but you get the idea. With all those strings and pinwheel motion to the second power, you may need a Dramamine.

So I reckoned (what am I today, Jed Clampett?) that I had better break up the busyness with a narrow sashing between the blocks, which meant a trip to the fabric store on Wednesday. While there, I also bought some Kona Candy Blue for the second border, and Kona Rich Red for the final border. And then! THEN! I found the cutest stripe/dot fabric for the binding, which I'll also show you next week when the whole top is done. I am excited to finish sewing it all together this weekend!

So what else... Oh, I took some pics of a little attic windows quilt top I put together just before I started this blog.

Found the vintage bird fabric at Goodwill last year and didn't know what I was going to do with it, but it needed to be rescued from that tumbled up Domestics table and come home with me.


I eventually came up with the idea to put this wall hanging size thing together so I could (a) use the fabric, and (b) have something to practice free-motion quilting on with the new Juki machine. Now that it's ready to quilt, however, I am not sure I want to free-motion quilt over the birdies. Should I hand quilt it? Ditch quilt it by machine? What? This joins a couple other small projects lingering in the UFO pile in a similar state. Hopefully, once I get one done, I'll have some confidence and momentum to tackle the others and get them finished.

Here's the very first attic windows wall hanging I did sometime in the late '90s:

The pattern was from a book I'd checked out from the library, the title and author of which I remember not, sorry.

I did a little hand quilting on this, and added the silvery moon and stars embellishments.

I had this hanging in my workspace during my days at the law firm, a window in my otherwise windowless cube, as well as a symbol of the creative spark that awaited nurturing.

Hope you have a productive and enjoyable weekend!

4 comments:

Michelle said...

Ooh, the sneak peek at the string pinwheels is so tantalizing. I can't wait to see more!

What beautiful attic windows--both! I've never done one, but looking at yours is inspiring. (As if my quilting bucket list wasn't long enough already!) As for quilting the attic windows with the vintage bird fabric, in my wanders on Sew & Tell, I noticed one quilter with a big floral fabric had stitched an outline around the flowers. Wonder if you could do that with the birds?

Michelle said...

Excellent song too! :-)

GaAm said...

I was thinking the same as Michelle. If you stitched around the birds they would sort of pop out in a 3-D fashion, making it look more like you are looking through a window at a bird.

SueWis said...

Love that bird fabric! I agree that outlining the birds would be pretty.