The Tortoise and the Hare and the Snail

Here are the strip sets I have made so far for the Clown Kaleidoscope quilt I am making as part of Cathy's (of Sane, Crazy, Crumby Quilting) string quilt marathon. The slight difference is that she is apparently making 26 string quilts and I'm making one, maybe, assuming someone doesn't come along and post something else or maybe Buddy wants to have a deep philosophical discussion. And yes, I am starting a movement called "Super Slow" Quilting that uses a distracted, jumpy attention span to reduce progress to a crawl.

Meanwhile, let's go back to the Clark County Quilters' show. This is a quilt called Over The Hill by Nancy Tubbs based on a Wendy Williams Block of the Month. First, let me assure you that the quilt is not blurry in real life and seems to stem from a problem with the photographer. This quilt won 2nd place.

I particularly liked this quilt because of this detail. The circles over the stripe would make a great fabric design and really gave life to this border stripe. The quilter for this quilt is DeAnn Perrigo of Quiltthyme Studio.

Here is another quilt made by Nancy Tubbs as part of another Block of the Month with Wendy Williams. This quilt is called What Next?, and it also won 2nd place, but for the "Mixed" category.

 

Here's my favorite quilting detail for this quilt, also quilted by DeAnn Perrigo of Quiltthyme Studio. Apparently I like circles...but the jaunty angles is a nice subtle touch in a quilt where all parts are calling attention to themselves.

Chips to Shards

 Today I returned to Shards, the quilt from the most recent Kaffe Fassett book. The orange and green looks a bit off next to the blue, but hopefully it will have friends by the time I have finished. The last block features an old Kaffe fabric called Freckles along with Kathy Doughty's budgies (parakeets).

And today we return to the Clark County Quilters show to look at some tiny piecing. This is the famous Omigosh quilt by Sue Garmin, made by Vicky Mikesh (featured a couple of posts ago).

And here is a quilt made by Anne Gillihan based on the book by Tula Pink featuring 100 blocks. However, in the book, the blocks finish at six inches and here they finish at 1.5 inches. 

Here's a closeup in case you don't have a microscope handy.

All My Chips On The Table

Here are all the sun chip blocks sewn together. Next stop is a small border using leftovers of the white with black fabric. And no, I'm not using grayish fabric in the corners. My design wall is suffering from saggy skin. Probably better lighting than a stormy Portland sky would help as well.

And speaking of stormy skies, Princess Molly lost heat to her princess tent when the electricity went out yesterday. Buddy, too, had to leave his heated bed and search for primitive heat sources. And with two cats for one heat source, there may have been an altercation where a larger cat thought it could boss around a wee princess cat only to find her turn into a hornets' nest. 

Saturday was the last day of the Clark County Quilters' show, so I returned to pick up my quilts and help with takedown. I got there early so I had a chance to take a lot more pictures without dodging many people.

This was the best in show, a quilt called Remembrance by Judith Phelps. It uses raw edge applique and careful use of grays in the quilting to get the painterly effect.

Here is a detail showing the red fruit with snow.

And here is a detail of the sky.

And with that much machine quilting, why not make the quilt reversible? (That is, this is the back of the quilt...)

Quilt Show In Real Life

 Today I went to the Clark County Quilt Show...and it was quite wonderful. The quilts were impressive and the aisles were wide with room for social distancing. When I turned into the aisle with this quilt I laughed out loud. First, its made out of plaids so it looked as though it had been made from the same stash as my Bunny Hop quilt. And yet, it is spools. I thought...oh, I might have to make one...until I realized that it is all half-square triangles (HSTs) and I immediately reached for my allergy medicine.

This quilt is named Play It Again. It was made by Vicky Mikesh (our volunteer coordinator) from a Bonnie Hunter pattern. Linda Ivy quilted it.

The bunnies were strutting their stuff and were quite pleased that they had won the best hand quilting award. I noted that they had essentially one the award for being the only quilt with hand quilting and that in future years it will be called "The Throwback Award." At that point they had stopped listening to me as you can see by the kinked ears.

The chameleons were there too...but they were so frightened by the lights that they were frozen in place.

Microspool Shocker!

 I have been working on the microspools for a long time now and have been presenting them in small chunks as I finish them, usually between other projects. But recently Cathy at Sane, Crazy, Crumby Quilting showed a Clown Kaleidoscope that I want to make right now. It starts with strip piecing, a project that doesn't mix well with projects with 1 inch square pieces. I had three boxes of  stacks of cut microspool units ready to sew...

So I finished sewing all the microspools and here they are in a pile. Well, these are the addendum...I still have to sort these by color etc. so I can make sure I don't have any duplicates within this pile or with the original set of microspools. And yes, I have already found one duplicate sorting this pile.

The reason I loved this kaleidoscope was it looked vintage, yet was loaded with Kaffe fabrics. Combined with lots of polka dots, this quilt gives a serious clown vibe. I sort my scraps by color, not size, so my first task was sifting through my scraps pulling out fabrics that looks like something a clown might wear. 

And just as a side note, the quilt in question was made by Kathy Doughty and is in her book Adding Layers 2, and is called Stashbuster. That explains the delightfully quirky fabric combinations. 

And I would like to assure everyone that Molly's princess tent now sits on a heated cat pad. This is fortunate because Buddy now claims both of the regular heated beds for himself. 

The princess tent retains its flexibility though, if for example, there is a tent invasion by a red laser dot.

Clarissa

 One of the fun and simple pleasures in quilting is finding two fabrics that like each other. It's also fairly simple to cut a full 2.5 inch strip from each and sew them together. And once you do that, cutting that strip into 2.5 inch hunks seems like a natural next step.

It's natural because you sew those hunks together and you find yourself with 8 four patches plus change. A simple but slightly unusual next step is to line these up with opposite patches facing each other and then sewing a quarter inch seam around the edges.

Next, if you slice those sewn pairs into quarters along the diagonal (the way my mother cut my sandwiches!), you find yourself with four hourglass blocks...sixteen in total. And at no point in time did you come near that dreaded half-square triangle (HST). Of course, the obvious next step is to sew these sixteen hourglasses in pairs, then foursies, then eightsies, and then a single block.

At this point, you are well on your way to making the quilt "Shards" in Kaffe Fassett's Quilts in an English Village. I changed things up a bit...given I am not about to make one hour glass out of TWO HSTs. That is crazy behavior. They also have a block made from 25 hour glass blocks, but I went with 16 because that is what came out using two 2.5 inch strips. The final block is 9.75 inches unfinished.

Then this morning I stopped by Kathy's Quilts to see what dangerous kinds of quilting behaviors she might be engaging in...and there she is working with hour glass blocks about the size of a virus. And while I was reading her blog, there was a feline diversion, and the iPad slipped in my hands and sent me to a post about Clarissa's quilt...a quilt based on blocks with 36 hour glass blocks! Definitely a crazy town kind of quilt that I would never ever ever never go near...

Chips Alignment

I added a row of the sunchip blocks and rearranged them. These are blocks I made as part of the Rainbow Scrappy Challenge. It already has plenty of light green blocks, so its time for assembly...unless I decide it needs to be bigger. Again.

And as you can see I am still having problems with moving from Photoshop as my photo editor.  I have affirmed that the problem stems from human error and not a problem with the new program. Sigh.

Meanwhile, if you're like me, you can't quite believe you lived half your life without the internet and a search engine. Then you can also imagine how Molly feels about her Princess tent (originally featured on the Kitten Academy livestream). Here Molly is showing off the tent's flying features.