Design Wall Monday: Athena’s Puzzle

Yesterday I started cleaning my sewing room.  Over the winter too much junk has accumulated in there and it’s time to get rid of things, put stuff away and get a little better organized.  In the process of doing so I found these blocks.  They are made from Heather Bailey prints from a pattern called Athena’s Puzzle by Blue Underground Studio.  It’s a fun little log cabin variation.

The blocks are all pieced but the project was derailed when I couldn’t decide on the border.  There is a diagonal stripe in the line that would make a great inner border.

However, when I started to cut the border I realized the stripe goes the “wrong” way.  If I want that great diagonal (left), there would be seams every 18” since I only have a half yard of the fabric.  If I cut it the other way, across the width of fabric, the stripe doesn’t work, it’s more a zigzag (right). 

In the big scheme of things, it probably doesn’t matter.  I just need to get in there, cut it and GET THIS  FINISHED!!

Be sure to check out all the other great projects in process at Patchwork Times.

Auditioning Borders

A border can really make or break a scrap quilt.  When I had the quilt shop customers frequently came in for help in choosing a border for a quilt and we were always happy to pull lots of fabric to try out.  I always think it’s a good thing to not have your heart (and mind) set on a particular color or print for a border until you’ve auditioned several fabrics.  You really can’t know ahead of time which one will really make your quilt sing!  Since I use so many fabrics in scrap quilts it can sometimes be a challenge to find the right border fabric. Sometimes a fabric that I think will be perfect for a quilt just falls flat. I’ll often pull 20 or 30 fabrics to find one that truly accentuates the pieced center.

This is an example of a border that just doesn’t work. 

The colors are good, but the print has too much light fabric and doesn’t coordinate with the center.  Even the inner border is distracting.  That’s the biggest reason this is still in my UFO pile.  I’ve contemplated  taking the border off and either replacing it or leaving it off completely.  It’s partially quilted though so that would be a pain.  What I think I’ll do with it now, is just bind it, donate it and move on.  Really that’s the most sensible option.

A couple of weeks ago, I made this charm quilt.  Originally I had planned to use a little tone on tone dark green print from the same line as the charm squares.  I wasn’t crazy about how it looked and then I found this printed plaid in my stash and now I love the quilt.  The border just adds so much to it.  I just need to hand stitch the binding and it will be finished.

This morning I finished piecing this chained rails top.  I’m still not liking the chain fabric too much.  It just didn’t have enough contrast, but I was too far into the project to change it.  Again, I’m just going to move forward, finish it and give it away.  I’m hoping the borders will help it out a little bit because it is a nice quilt otherwise.  Here are a few fabrics under consideration.

There is a lot of green in the quilt and I thought maybe a green border would work but this one is kind of ho hum.  Next I tried a brown but up close I didn’t really like the print.

I usually really like plaids for borders on scrap quilts.  I thought this might be a perfect fit because the quilt has a lot of blue and red.  It doesn’t work because of the light in the plaid.  The quilt doesn’t have any other fabrics that light.

Brown was still my top choice so I tried a dark brown.  It looked pretty good but I still thought there might be something better.

Red wasn’t a color I had even considered but I saw this fabric and I think it’s my top choice.  It’s a little black and red homespun plaid check.

I’ll add a narrow black stop border, then the red check. 

I’ll get the borders on and quilt it then show a picture of the finished quilt then you can decide if I made a good border choice or not!

No News Must Be Good News

Here’s your laugh of the day. Appleton is a sleepy little town where there’s rarely any big news but the top story in today’s paper was ridiculous even for here.  The lead story, no kidding, was about the most popular dog name in the city.  Apparently, the investigative reporter combed the dog license records to glean the top name. The article took up about 3/4 of the front page and there was even a picture of a couple who had a dog with this name. I guess it’s better than reading about robberies and murders,and I'm grateful for that, but honestly, this isn’t news anywhere, on any day!  Oh, and I know you're dying to find out---the most popular dog name in Appleton, Wisconsin is---Molly.

Today I quilted another of the quilts in my April UFO parade.  This was a teaching sample from several years ago.  I used the 7" Crazy Curves templates from Elisa’s Backporch Design.  Every time I taught the class I started a new sample so I must have made about 10 of these quilts!  I LOVE the templates, though and it is a very easy quilt.  This one used a lot of “Whimsical” fabric and I had the plaid border in my stash.  I hope I still have enough of it for the binding.  Tomorrow I’ll sew a machine binding and the quilt will be ready to donate.  This will be my third finish from the UFO Parade—that’s one a week.  Now if I can only keep up that pace.  The picture is a little awkward because it’s POURING rain and I was trying to take it on the front porch.

UFO Parade

What a coincidence that Judy at Patchwork Times has just started a UFO challenge.  Boy do I need some incentive to finish some things as I have a ton of UFOs and I just found more!

I am really inept when it comes to decorating my house.  I knew I’d have guests on several occasions this spring so I wanted to update my mantle.  I found a beautifully decorated mantle on Pinterest  by Dining Delights here—everything on her blog is incredibly beautiful--and wanted to use some of those elements in my house.  So I went downstairs to see what kind of spring decorations I could use and found this on top of the box of spring décor.

It’s another huge stack of UFO’s.  I really don’t understand how (or why) I spend who knows how many hours selecting fabric, cutting, piecing, layering, then quilting only to stop and abandon the project with only the binding remaining.  Some of these quilts even have the binding machine sewn so only the hand stitching is left to do.  Am I the only one who does this?

Here’s a list of these UFO’s.  I’d like to get them finished because most of them could be donated to Quilts for Kids, Quilts Beyond Borders or our local emergency center and that would be a large stack out of my house.  Double bonus!

Technorati Tags: UFO,piecing,decorating

1. Mirrored Boxes
2. Blue and Yellow log cabin variation
3. Scrappy log cabin
4. Buzzsaw variation
5. Christmas block of the month
6. Grandma’s brown and red quilt
7. Brown and green crazy curves
8. Children’s black skateboard quilt
9. Children’s primary star quilt
10. Red/white/blue Ohio Star
11. Unterrageri
12. Peach and green Ohio Star

I just cringe when I think about how old some of these are.  I’m sure the peach and green one hasn’t been touched in over 20 years!  Here’s to getting them finished and gifted!

And my mantle?  I’m really happy with it!