What Are Quilters Blogging About Today?

       So I was in my sewing studio minding my own business putting fabric scraps away when I came across this strip set of Kaffe fabric strips sent to me by Quiltdiva Julie in a plastic box with Kaffe scraps. All else faded. I opened it up and pinned it on the design wall. Squirrel! I pressed it and cut it into 2 1/2" strips and put it back on the wall. I arranged the strips a few times. Ah, the colors washed over me and smiled.
     Once I figure out the layout, I auditioned fabrics for above and below ...

      I took strip pairs to the retreat that were pulled from my stash to make the Maggie Pearl free pattern I saw other blog friends make. Each set of strips makes one block. I sewed all the strips and subcut them, sewing again, and then tried to arrange them in a coherent way.

     This a wonderful pattern from Wilmington Prints, although I can't find it online at the moment, called Confetti. It used one 40 strip jelly roll and one 40 strip blues jelly roll (I cut different blues to make mine). It took time to arrange the strip sets in colors that would value grade and move the eye.

I tried a bunch of strip set layouts, did not like a couple of the strips, especially the two toothy looking ones.

Looked through my batiks to see what I could substitute

Settled on this layout and strips

Sewing pairs, then pairs ...

I've decided that for me, and my sewing room, this year will be the year of STRINGS! Back in the spring of 2019 I had my granddaughters help me to sort through all the strips and strings that I had stashed underneath the cutting table. We organized them into color groups. Sadly, that's as far as it got. Until yesterday!I started with an idea and the low volume bin. I laid out the strings into

I've decided that for me, and my sewing room, this year will be the year of STRINGS! Back in the spring of 2019 I had my granddaughters help me to sort through all the strips and strings that I had stashed underneath the cutting table. We organized them into color groups. Sadly, that's as far as it got. Until yesterday!I started with an idea and the low volume bin. I laid out the strings into

I've been sharing with you the quilts I've been making for my nieces and nephews, the ones who have not received one in a while.  I overlooked three of them so thought I'd get caught up on that and do a recap.

The ones I've already posted about are Josh, Ashley, Laura, Nikki, Travis, Paige, Natalie, Emily, Carrie, Karlie, Kourtnie, and Kacie's. (Each name has a link attached in case you'd like to see them.)  All of them were made since 2018.  Thank goodness, I have a fantastic quilter (Shirley Jackson) I can depend ...

      Time for reckoning. This quilt top has sat in a ball in a bag long enough. It has to be dealt with. It is from back in Feb. 2020. It had a nasty curve and uneveness making it unusable. After dealing with another difficult quilt to fix, I waded into this one. I decided not to cut it into smaller blocks, but try to deal with it as it was. The pattern is free from Jo's Country Junction https://www.joscountryjunction.com/meet-in-the-middle-new-free-pattern/
     The story: https://artinsearch.blogspot.com/2020/02/uh-oh-quilt-on-wall-not-fairest-of-them.html

 
     I decided to unstitch a number ...

     I do not like bad surprises. I never liked practical jokes. So when I put up Meet in the Middle strips (Kona white I cut and Kaufman jelly roll) as sewn, there was a nasty surprise. The quilt was way longer on one side and it has huge pucker issues, funky angle, like it has some inner angst. 
     I have made strip quilts like this, but not with the pieced prints, usually one print and one white. From the appearance, I can only surmise the flaws. One, the strips were sewn slightly off. Second, the print pieces were not sewn ...

My eight year old daughter recently picked this quilt out of some inspiration photos I had saved over the years as her big girl quilt. I wish I could find where I got the photo so I could attribute the praise properly, if anyone recognizes it, I'd love to give proper credit!