Turkey Tracks: February Quilty Update

Turkey Tracks:  February 14, 2017

February Quilty Update

I love winter because I have lots of uninterrupted time to sew.  Plus, I love snow.

I am ticking along with all the various projects and having fun seeing them come together.

Here’s Katja Marek’s EPP millifiore quilt in progress.  I have almost finished a large section at the bottom left  and will be adding it soon.  It’s in shades of blue.  And the addition of the blue will make the left edge complete.

Yes, this quilt is very funky, and I have no idea how it will look when it’s done, but…  I am having fun.

You can see the piles of completed blocks of the Farmer’s Wife–each a column–above the millifiore.

That top was finished last night.

I liked the zig-zag setting, but it requires cutting four of the blocks in half on the short rows!!!  I thought the quilt too long and skinny, so added two columns and used the five extra blocks I had on the upper left (2) and lower right (3).

I got a little OCD–ok, a lot OCD–about setting up blocks for one of Willyne Hammerstein’s quilts, “Valse Brilliante.”  Hammerstein is Austrian, and her colors are very European.  I’m doing my version in brights and neutrals, and each block will have some text fabric in it.  I got a bundle of “pearl bracelet” fabrics that are bright and colorful, so I ironed them all, and I can’t bear to put them away again until I’ve finished.  There are also some bright Japanese daisy prints I like–as you can see below.  It actually takes a while to set up one of these blocks, but now that I’ve used up all the red wonderclips, I’ve slowed down.  I try to sew EPP with matching thead as much as is possible.

I have these fabrics left to cut and glue:

Some of us here in Camden, Maine have formed the Mt. Battie Modern Quilt Guild, which is in addition to our venerable Coastal Quilters, which is a chapter in the Pine Tree Quilt Guild.

I am so drawn to the “modern” fabrics and the graphic nature of the modern quilts.  And, there is a strand that is modern/traditional, or some such title.   So, we are going to have even more quilty goodness.

We are going to do a “traveling” quilt and will turn in our initial pieces on March 2nd.  I have made this piece as my offering and look forward to seeing how it comes back to me.  I’m not thinking this piece will be a center medallion that gets developed.  And I will go back in with pearl cotton when the quilt is layered to embellish such as the exclamation point at the end of the “Love.”  The “blue moon” and the back side of the sliver moon were cut with one of those rotary circle cutters–which I learned from our workshop with Timna Tarr.

My alphabet was modeled on the one I found in Mary Lou Weidman and Melanie Bautista McFarland’s OUT OF THE BOX WITH EASY BLOCKS.

We had a major snowstorm starting Monday night and ending Tuesday night–a blizzard.  There was a near complete “white out” and lots of high wind.  I have about 2 feet of MORE snow on the ground now.  As the storm abated, I made my way down the steep drive to my mailbox and retrieved the first Cotton+Steel fabric club package from Pink Castle fabrics.  Isn’t it pretty?

I’m already thinking about making the next set of Tula Pink’s 100 City blocks.  Some of us are doing 8 blocks a month.  (You can see an earlier post on that challenge.)

I hope your winter is wonderful!

Enjoy it.  Slow down.  Hibernate.  Spring with all of its energy will be here in due course.