Untitled

Why Untitled? Hmmmm, well that's just how my brain is working these days. Not a ton of creative juices flowing over here. Just finished up 2 weeks of passing around an illness in our house, and I was stuck with it last week. Haven't been sewing alot, (but I want to!). It just seems like every time I get a few moments to myself I determine that it would be better worth my time to clean the kitchen, or do laundry. I'm sure that's just my brain making excuses for being in a creative slump.

So here is the one thing I have worked on recently. It's going to be a baby quilt!
 

A good customer of mine had me make this template set for her, it was her idea, and she spent some time with me tweaking it so it would work just perfectly. Let me tell you, it's super, super easy to sew up. It's a very gentle curve, no pinning or gluing required. The 3 pieces sew up super fast to make 1 unit of the 4 unit block. In the pic above, the top 4 blocks are all sewn together, and it was about a total of an hour an a half invested, cutting and all. I'm hoping to get these templates listed in the shop in the next couple of weeks. I'm going to have the designer name the template set, and show us her lovely (way more awesome than mine) quilt top soon.

I love collaborations like these, they are especially helpful when I'm having a hard time coming up with my own designs. This is sort of a variation on the "Robbing Peter to pay Paul" traditional quilt block, the first antique quilt image I found of this is here. This is a bit different though, and way easier to sew. Really, it's hard to come up with a totally 'new' concept or quilt block, people have been doing this for 100s of years, it's almost all been done before in some form. That being said, it does take a lot of time and thought to go through the process of making these things geometrically perfect, and coming up with easier ways of putting the elements together. And testing, lots of testing. I really do love a math challenge though, and this one was fun to work on.

I haven't been doing nothing though, I've been hitting the gym pretty hard these days, and have made some major strength improvements. Like an 133 pound clean and jerk! (Oh, I love the names of Olympic lifts...)  Any other quilters out there doing Crossfit?  Initially I thought people at the gym would laugh at me about the quilting hobby, these are pretty hardcore peeps, right? Well, there a bunch of crafty types there, knitters, sewists, etc. Love that about Portlandia...   Cheers all