Season Opener: SQ#13 is Off and Running

It's the opening Saturday of the college football season, and therefore of course opening day of the 2010-2011 Quilting Season! Unfortunately, my #1 team is under suspension, but my emergency backup team, Oregon State, put up a pretty good fight against #6 TCU.

As the pregame rigmarole was happening, I thought about some various season-opening tasks I could do, such as getting a mental inventory of projects in progress, coming up with a list of ideas for new projects, or even just organizing fabrics. But then I thought -- no, I just get some momentum going. I want to some good old fashioned cutting and sewing without thinking too hard.

So here's a one-game face for a new Storm Quilt -- It will be SQ#13.

Now this is obviously not a masterpiece, but I love it because it's exactly the kind of thing I was thinking of when I came up with the QuiltStorm idea. It is, of course, made of scrap and salvage. The green is from a piece of salvage that's been around for years, the red is a poly/cotton gingham that I bought at 50 cents for 2 3/4 yards at an estate sale last weekend, and the beige was a sheet with a big hole in it that Mrs.5000 brought home out of a freebox earlier in the week. The thread was garage-sale C&C -- from your garage sale, Sarah, if you're reading this. The batting and back are still to come, but they'll be salvage too.

But more to the point, it was FAST. The StormQuilts were supposed to be made simply and quickly, but I immediately started getting fussy and reducing the scale of the pieces. That takes time. Whereas, a full-size quilt top that can be conceived, cut, sewn, and pressed during four quarters of football -- that's fast enough to deserve the "storm" appellation.

Game on, people!

StormQuilt #12: Finished

After I finished Purple and Blue last week, I did a little straightening up in my project room and was surprised to see how far along so many projects were. The goofiest example was the twelfth of the QuiltStorm series, QS#12, which was finished except for perhaps 45 minutes of thread-burying. In a rare sun-break -- the City of Roses has been having record-breaking rain this spring -- I took it out on the back porch and finished it up.

Like all of the StormQuilts, it is made out of 100% scrap and recycled materials. In this case, the face and binding are all scrap corduroy. As if that wasn't heavy enough already, I batted it with an old mattress pad. The backing is an old dark blue flannel sheet from a set we discarded last year. Definitely a winter-weight piece.

It's 72" x 48" and quilted exactly like you see in the picture. It has been fun to work in corduroy (I used fabric from the same batch of scraps in SQ11 and in the Mondrian Quilt (which is basically finished except for a hanging sleeve -- another project that has been sitting around teetering on the edge of finished)). Whoops, got lost in my parentheses there. What I meant to say is, it has been fun to work in corduroy because it takes quilting really well. Your lines really stand out in it.

I've been getting some serious quilting on, and I'm going to be able to put some more time into a couple pieces over the next week, so hopefully there will be a parade of smug little "finished" posts occasionally this summer!

Purple and Blue

Here's my first finished piece in however long. I don't really have a name for it, other than Purple and Blue. It's officially Quilt #57 (although it's probably about the 70th quilt I've made. Long story). It measures 69" x 90". And it looks pretty flat & dull here -- my wife ran off for the week with the good camera.



The "inspiration," such as it was, was an attempt to clear out some space in my drawers of blues and purples. Anything scrappy that was longish and narrowish got cut into two-inch strips. I sewed those strips together pretty randomly end-to-end to good a big heap of 100" strips. Here they are hanging on a bamboo pole in the quilt room.



Once I had enough strips, I just laid them out in the hall, making sure that no two pieces of the same fabric were too close to each other, and that none of the join seams in the strips lined up too closely.



After that, it was just a matter of sewing the thing together. It's backed with three pieces of cheap blue and grey flannel sewn together, and batted with a scrap bedspread I found for a pittance at a thrift store. The quilting just follows the vertical grain, with two lines about 1/4 inch from the edge of each strip. It is heavy, and cozy, and is probably the best-looking quilt per hour of time invested I've ever made.

He Lives...

I've been sneaking in a little quilting...

This Blog is Under Wraps

State of the Craft is currently inactive. I am still quilting, but at a fairly slow pace for the time being, and I am somewhat out of touch with the wider quilting community.

I will likely feel like writing about quilts and quilting again some time in the future. In the meantime, if you feel like following my various adventures -- including, possibly, quilting -- I publish pretty much daily at The Life & Times of Michael5000.

SQ11: Finished

You saw the face of this one last year, but here it is completed. It's made from salvage denim, backed with green cotton material that was probably curtains in its past life, and batted with an old poly blanket. It is nothing if not warm.

The quilting is pretty visible here, and simply followed the -- what's the word I'm looking for? -- the grain of the corduroy. I'll point out, too, that the photograph makes it look yellower than it really is, which makes it look a little dirty, which it isn't. UPDATE: I got a better photograph, so the colors aren't all yellowed out now. The blue and gray is actually pretty sharp in person. If I do say so myself.

Quilting the Jennifer Challenge

I did virtually no quilting in September and the bulk of October, mostly because I was doing other interesting and worthwhile things instead. Started edging back up to speed this week by quilting the Jennifer Challenge. I decided on the quilting pattern rather spur-of-the-moment, and I'm making all of those curves with a walking foot. Seems to be working....