New Year's UFO Resolutions

Feeling guilty here about having gotten sidetracked again from ongoing projects to make a couple of new quilts. And i can't help noticing how the list of UFOs keeps growing. Sooo, here is a list of UFOs i plan to finish this year:

grandmother's fan
Autumnal Tumbling Blocks
Indigo Star (3 versions)
Amish Dahlia
yellow and blue star for Franny
Sophie's bargello
blue Tumbling Blocks for Amelia
Hidden Ninepatch for Julian

Not-Yet Begun Projects that are tempting me:
a ragtime in muted pinks and browns
a bear's paw
contemporary, simple quilt in Autumnal batiks

UFOs i'm leaving on the backburner for 2011:
log cabin
Sister's Choice for moi me me

Today, finished sewing the top together. Now it just needs borders. Also, it's found a home! David, an old friend in Austin likes it, so now I will finish it up and send it to him. Funny, how knowing who it's for makes a project more fun to work on.

Revised layout

The rows are all sewn together now, and some of the sashing. It's close to being done. I'm not really happy with the change of green. Would prefer to use only the darker green, but this is the big drawback of quilting out in the German quilting wilderness: not so easy to run down to the fabric store and pick up more of a needed fabric, even something as basic as this. Even if you were by some miracle to find it, it wd be 2-3 times as expensive, so i generally just use what i have. I always feel i'm channelling my grandmother or my pioneer forebears, when i do stuff like that.

Back to Drawing Board

So Mitzie finally politely admitted that she doesn't like the pattern below (the hidden nine patch). "Something with more symmetry." I'm not surprised. I only did this because it was so quick, but to be honest, i don't like it much myself. This is actually good news, because now that it's no longer a quilt for Mitzie, i can use green (thumbs down on the green earlier). My plan is to recombine these little blocks with light green sashing, to give it more orderliness and a more interesting palette, and then donate it. My earliest idea was to do something like above with white sashing, but i realized there wouldn't be enough contrast between the white and the lavender. I don't know if Quilts of Valor have to be red white and blue, but if not, i thought the pattern above might be nice for a girl soldier. Anyway, that's the plan.

Mitzie's Quilt?

A Passion for Purple. I'll always remember my younger sister Mitzie returning home from an outing with our Aunt Ada, sporting a dressy, new lavender wool coat and carrying a lavender bunny rabbit that Auntie Ada had bought her downtown. This was just before Easter and she was about 5 then. It was on that day that she announced that purple was her favorite color. I asked her recently if she still loved purple and she said yes, and that she likes pink as well, "pretty much any color except beige".

After I finished Laura Ann's quilt, i found i still had piles of purple and suddenly felt inspired to make a quilt for Mitzie, so I'm experimenting here. Not sure if she will like this, but if she doesn't i will find another victim for it.

Finished Borders

Finally finished adding the borders to the Friendship Star quilt. In the end, ironically, i only used a small amount of the original fabric that Laura Ann sent me. I think the outermost border and the thin green checked border were among them.

I used my camera to try out and more easily compare how different combinations looked and finally decided on the one above. If i'd had to decide without comparing different options, i wouldn't intuitively have gone for this one, so the photos and lots of experimenting really helped. Below was one of the combos i rejected.

Can Quilting Prevent Memory Loss?

I just saw this article on the New Old Age blog.

"At the age of 78, Bob Branham, a retired computer software developer in Dallas, Tex., took up quilting. It wasn’t his idea, actually. He’d never dreamed of piecing together his own Amish diamond coverlet or rummaging around Jo-Ann Fabrics in search of calico prints. But then he enrolled in a trial sponsored by the National Institute on Aging to assess whether learning a new skill can help preserve cognitive function in old age. By random assignment, he landed in the quilting group.

... neuroscientists suspect that learning a challenging new skill — a new language, a new musical instrument — may be even more effective than mental games at keeping the brain sharp. And quilting is more complicated than it may seem..."

Maybe this explains why my grandmother (the galloping horse one) was still as sharp as ever when she died at 97. I wonder how helpful quilting is if you've already been doing it for years. Maybe if you continue to expand your repertoire of skills and keep experimenting, it has the same effect.

Friendship Stars Finished

Finished piecing the Friendship Star blocks and put them together for a lap quilt for Laura Ann. Work has gotten in the way a bit, but now i'm doing the borders. I love doing borders, because it reminds me of matting and framing a painting, not something i've done that much of, but the possibilities interest me.

Trying to decide now whether to do a pieced border or just keep adding strips in varying widths and shades of purple and green. I'm leaning toward the latter option, because i think it will be easier to make the whole thing harmonize that way. Since i don't have much of the fabric from the stars left, there's a risk of a pieced border in different fabrics fighting too much with the stars.

The colours in this remind me a little of the 70s, like the cover of a book about astrology or wizardry or something. It's a color scheme I never would have dreamed up, if left to my own devices, but that's one thing i like about making quilts for other people: it forces me to discover new things all the time. And I've come to like this, inspite of my initial skepticism.

Berlin

I was in Berlin over the weekend and saw an exhibition of bears from all over the world. It's an international art project. The Bear is the symbol of Berlin.
Berlin Buddy Bears


"You are entering the American Sector..."