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.

 

Orange coins and sixteen patches

 

Here are the long bitcoin and the short bitcoin. 

And here are the sixteen patches in orange. If you would like to see more orange before it runs out at the end of the month, run, don't walk to the Rainbow Scrappy Challenge. 

Updates and Upgrades

 We are enjoying a fabulous upgrade in our lifestyle, but before we flaunt our good fortune, let's get through all the boring quilting stuff. Since I can never remember the name of the blocks and quilt that Alison Glass designed, I am going to refer to these as Glass chips from now on. In any case, I made more to fill out a section, and almost had enough for another column. Let's see if I can resist making it bigger.

I also made 102 more microspools and am showing you just a sample of them.  But the big news is that Molly's princess bed/tent arrived!

As you know, Molly and I watch the Kitten Academy shopping channel and saw the bed someone sent for the kitten "Princess Paisley." Of course, her mother Loom used it the most using it as her launching pad for attacks on toys and kittens (lovingly, but exuberant).  Given Molly's favorite kitten toy was a tulle bag, I knew she would enjoy this tent. (Unfortunately, the tulle bag shrunk drastically over time...)

This bed/playroom is perfect for the kitten that likes to hide yet stay the center of attention at all time. That said, this clearly did not meet any safety standards for children's stuffed animals. It comes wadded in a bag with six pointy plastic sticks, four corner protectors and four connectors and no instructions. However, what made it quite difficult to put together was that Molly insisted on being inside as I tried to put it together.

And best of all, the princess bed/tent is quite small which precludes its use by random dogs or ponies that might wander by.

Meanwhile, here are the shelves for cat food at my local grocery store. But of course, there is no reason to worry about us because we have a massive hoard of cat food stored away.

Our cat food reserve is so large and massive we've named it Buddy.