Quick Thursday Random

This summer schedule is kicking my butt. Yesterday, left the house around 7, got back here for lunch and a shower around noon, then ran over to the department around 1 and went through two soil samples. Ran an errand, came back home, practiced piano, and then went out to a meeting that was supposed to start at 6 pm but wound up not starting until 6:30.

I'm taking tomorrow off. For one thing, I have to run down to Hagerman and do some paperwork re: the permitting to go on-site, but also, I really, really, really need a day doing something different. Fieldwork is INTENSE.

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Also, I think I've been spending too much time outside - last night I dreamed that I was LIVING outside - I mean, sleeping outside, and trying to find all my food from natural stuff. And I was miserable. (I think it was for some kind of contest or reality-show thing). I just wanted to be inside where it was clean and I could control the air temperature and where I could take a shower....

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I'm slowly picking away at the current quilt top I'm sewing (which is different from the quilt I am quilting). I'm still not sure how it's going to turn out; some of the colors seem maybe a little fighty. Oh well.

I also started cutting a few pieces for the OM NOM NOM quilt, and I figured out that for a minimal size I would need 99 blocks. I have just over 50 fabrics, so I might add an extra row on the bottom (108 blocks) and do two blocks from every fabric I have (plus, I cut three sets of block-pieces from the fabric that was the first one I acquired; the one that inspired it all).

The nice thing about the patterns in this book (Marsha McCloskey's Block Party) is that the vast majority of them, she shows you how you can rotary-cut the "bits" for the blocks. This block has some triangular pieces in it, but you can cut them by cutting squares to the right dimensions (which she gives) and then diagonally cutting them - to get two half-square triangles.

It's a lot easier and faster to rotary cut (for the non-quilters: this is a thing that looks kind of like a pizza cutter. You use it along with heavy plastic rulers and you can cut very straight edges and things like very precise squares. The one thing you have to be careful of is that the rotary cutter is crazy sharp and you can cut yourself - they tell you if you have children, that you should either keep it locked up or in a very high place when you're not using it.) The older method of cutting quilt pieces is to trace around a template (now we mostly use plastic templates - and you can buy plastic you can cut to any shape) with a pencil or chalk pencil, and then cut out with scissors. This has a couple drawbacks: quilt fabric, even though it's a woven, can stretch if you put much pressure on it (And the pencils drag and can distort the fabric), and if you cut a lot with scissors it can be tiring on the hands or lead to blisters. The upside of "fussy cutting," as it's sometimes called, is that you can make use of very tiny scraps of fabric. And you can also orient the pieces so you get design elements that you specifically want to capture. (Though there are some rotary-cutting methods - some of the Stack and Whack methods - that may also incorporate this).

In the "really old days," people used to use cardboard templates (often cut from cereal boxes). The big problem with those is they wear away over time....so the 50th piece you trace off a template might be a hair smaller than the first you traced, and that can lead to inaccuracies.

I used not to like rotary cutting; some of the patterns I saw, it seemed like a lot of fabric was wasted - so for the first few quilts I made, I fussy-cut everything (but using plastic templates). But now I'm a convert to the rotary method: for one thing, it's more accurate. For another, it is a lot faster - fewer steps to worry about. And it's less hard on your hands than tracing and then cutting is. And there are a lot of quilt patterns designed to work with in - in fact, if you want to do any kind of "strip" quilting, like where you make the individual subunits of nine-patch blocks a bunch at a time, you really kind of need to cut those strips using a rotary cutter.

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I found the template I need if I'm going to re-trace the outer border on the quilt I'm currently quilting. I have a LOT of hand-quilting templates now; I have a lot I bought because at one time it seemed like they were hard to find, and I got concerned that maybe "everyone" was going over to machine-quilting and that if I wanted specific templates, I would need to get them NOW and hang on to them. Also, I bought some "oddball" ones (bunnies with dandelions) as I saw them at a quilt shop or somewhere - it's interesting how different the stock of two quilt shops in the same part of the country or even the same town are, but they do all carry different things (which is what makes quilt shops interesting). I also have the templates I inherited from Faith. And now I have a big stack from another of my mother's former-quilter friends. Helen is still around, though - she just realized her arthritis was too bad for her to continue to hand quilt (Though now I think - that would be kind of a horrible thing for a person, I think, to realize they could no longer do a hobby they'd done for a big part of their lives). So she passed her templates on to my mom, and it turned out my mom already had most of them, so she passed them on to me. I've not really gone through them to see if they duplicate any that I have (and I really need to go through and reorganize my quilting templates - they're scattered all over my sewing room and the closet I store supplies in). I don't know anyone who is a beginning hand-quilter in my town or I'd see if they wanted any duplicates I had.

(Hm. I don't know but maybe quilting templates are a bit like that Amish Friendship Bread starter, where they expand over time and you have to find new people to give them to).