Sunlight and Shadows blocks

This for a while has felt a bit like a never-ending project, but finally, there's an end in sight. I've been working, off and on, on this quilt since August 2007.

Right now it looks like I could finish it. I'm only one block short of having enough to make a decent sized quilt, but I'm still holding out for one more row and one more column. (I like quilts to either be square or to conform to a particular ratio of width to length. So 4 12-in blocks by 6 is too long or not wide enough, but 5x6 or 4x5 is perfect.)

After much humming and hawing about it, I decided to sign up for the Livejournal Birthday Blocks group again this year. Depending how things play out, I'll either get 9 blocks via the group (and so will need only 6 more) or else I'll get 18 blocks and then have 3 spares, which I don't yet know what I'd do with them, but. In any case, by... late September (all things going well) I should have all the blocks I need to finish this thing. Brilliant.

And then comes the hard part - figuring out placement of the blocks. And then the harder part - actually quilting the thing. Eek.

Holiday Week - Day Four

My days off are coming to an end, far too soon. There is today, of course, and sort of Saturday/Sunday, but really this is kind of it. And I've made tentative plans to spend most of today with a friend.

Anyway, this block is one of the first things I finished yesterday - the December block for my Block of the Month group. I think this is my favourite of the three blocks so far. The orange still drags the print down so that it hardly stands out, but in general, I think it's got a better balance between the good fabrics and the bad. The burgundy doesn't look quite so dingy.

i haven't edited the photos yet for them, but I also made 6 fabric postcards, which is about half of what I'm hoping to get done. They're all Christmasy in theme, though some of them are more Christmas than others. They'll get a separate post all their own, once I'm ready to edit and upload the photos.

And then here is a peak at what the other two tree pillows I made look like. I really prefer the colours in these pillows to the blue one I showed yesterday, but I suspect my grandma would like the more muted blues better. It's entirely possible that once the pillow goes on the couch, it'll never come off (as with the last Christmas pillow I made her), so probably the blue is a better year-round choice as well.

There was a hockey game on tv last night, and I didn't want to disturb my sister and my brother-in-law's watching of it by having the sewing machine going, so I spent a while digging through things until I found the box full of my Sunlight/Shadows blocks. So these are the first 27 of an intended 56. I also discovered that I've got 8 more blocks already cut out and ready to go; I just need to sew them together. Which is pretty fantastic, since I cut out another 5 the other day. Which means that once they're done as well, I'll only need 16 more.

It's quite neat to see them all laid out like this, even without trying to arrange them in any particular way. I really like the way these kind of scrappy things come together when you repeat the pattern.

Holiday Week Day 2

So I don't actually have anything to post today that actually looks as if it's got anything to do with anything I posted yesterday. Well, it does, it just doesn't look it.

What I did today is cut out and sew together five 12-in blocks. That doesn't sound like a lot, really, and I wish that I'd done more, but it took quite a lot of time anyway. More time than I was expecting, though I was distracted by watching HGTV, which my brother in law had one in the living room.

The first blocks that I worked on are two Swap Angel blocks, the ones I mentioned yesterday when I said that I'd gone looking for blue and yellow fabrics (but hadn't found any). These two blocks are angel blocks for a Birthday Blocks group I follow on Livejournal. The recipient's request was for blues with pale yellows.

I no longer recall the name of this particular block, though I'm going to venture a guess that it's something to do with Flying Geese.

I think this one is called something like Mrs Bryan's Choice, though really it just reminds me of the CBC logo.

This one photographed really badly and if I hadn't already got it packed up to send away, I'd probably take a different picture to try to correct the colouring a bit.

Whenever I have fabric out for one project or another, I always try to cut out pieces to make a Sunlight/Shadows block, so this is one of those blocks. When I participated in the 2007 Birthday Blocks group, I had chosen to receive these blocks from everyone, and then decided to make the quilt using 56 of the blocks. Essentially that meant making around 50 spare blocks. I'm still plugging away at it, one block at a time. (It's important to me, though, that none of my blocks are exactly the same.)

One of these days I ought to unpack the shoe box with all the blocks so far in it. I need to count and see where I'm at. I'd like to know some end is in sight for the project, though I don't really mind too much if it takes another year or two to complete.

The reason I had that orange fabric in the previous block out is that I decided to use up some ugly stash fabric on a Block of the Month group at Livejournal. (Block of the Month.) Our year only just started in October, so this is the first block for the year. I really like the orange fireworks fabric, so it's too bad that the burgundy and the orange are such dingy looking fabrics. They really make everything look quite dull, but I hope that when it all comes together in the end, it'll look a little better than these two blocks on their own.

This is October's block, a 12-inch Memory Wreath.

This block for November, called Road to Oklahoma, is quite similar to the Sunlight/Shadow block I posted earlier. It looks so different though, with the fabrics in such different placement.

Again, you'd really think all that bright yellow would make this block bright and beautiful, but it still looks drab and dingy. Sigh.


Injury of the day: Aggravated an already bad back by spending too long hunched over cutting. Woe.

WIP: Sunlight and Shadows

These are the first 16 blocks (of an intended 56) for my Sunlight and Shadows quilt.

I mentioned in my first entry (and in the following ones) that I'm a member of a group on Livejournal where were exchange quilt blocks on each member's birthday, and this is the quilt that I'll be putting together with the blocks I'm receiving. So far, of the 15 blocks I should receive, I've gotten 8 blocks, and I've made most of the rest. (Two of them are blocks I got through a fabric/block exchange.)

I really love seeing progress pictures like this because I can see the quilt taking shape and how beautifully it's going to come together. I'm not very good at putting together colours (I worry too much about having things work perfectly, so scrappy is really hard for me to do) so seeing something like this is so reassuring. It looks fantastic now, how much better will it look with another 40 blocks? (I better get sewing - I have to make 30+ of those 40 blocks!)

Probably this quilt will be taking up most of my sewing time for the next while, but I'm not going to post individual pictures of the blocks as I make them, I'll just update whenever I've got another clump of them made.

Baby Steps

I had thought about starting out with a kind of.. this is who I am and this is what this blog is about, sort of post, but then I thought... nope, I'm just going to jump into the middle of things.

This isn't where I usually work on my quilting, but I live with my sister and her husband, and the day I was cutting these out, he was home and in the basement. He's a smoker (and I'm not) so I prefer not to work downstairs when he's there. My usual set-up usually has a table-top ironing board across the top of the table, and my sewing machine would probably be on the floor near my feet (if I were sitting).

All those squares of fabric up top are eventually going to be sunlight and shadows blocks - just like the blocks on the left. And just like these blocks here:



I'm a member of a group on Livejournal called Birthday Blocks, which is an exchange group. We make a block for each member's birthday, and in turn on our birthday, we get a block from everyone else. (A week late, though, and I've only received three of fifteen blocks.)

I requested these Sunlight and Shadows blocks because I wanted to try something I've never really done before - a repeating pattern, no sashing, full-sized, and scrappy. Although I'll only be receiving 15 blocks from the exchange group, I'm planning on making a quilt using 56 blocks, so I've got a lot of catching up to do.

It's really hard for me to make a scrappy quilt because I want badly to make everything match perfectly. And these blocks are difficult for me because I always want things to be symmetrical. So this quilt pushes some of my quilting buttons, and that's what I wanted, so that's a good thing. (Here's hoping I love it when it's finished...)