25 January 2009

I love it...With a little help from the blogosphere

I am a copycat. Let's just get that out there, right up front. I saw this post over at Crazy Mom Quilts (one of my favorite blogs), which led me to this post, which just inspired the hell out of me. It looks like a few people are loving this pattern right now. I guess I'm just not very original, but I don't really care. Amandajean from Crazy Mom Quilts is always such an inspiration to me! So I set to measuring and cutting and sewing and ironing...and came up with this:



which eventually became this:



and turned into this:



After repeating the cutting, sewing, ironing, sewing, ironing, sewing, trimming 36 times, I ended up with this:



And I am psyched. I managed to sew straight lines and iron well and be patient. And it turned out the way I imagined. YAY! It took me a while to figure out how to lay the squares so that they may the right pattern. I don't know what it is about my brain, but it can really screw me up sometimes when I am looking at things. Which is funny because I always think of myself as a visual learner. I think that things go one way, I do them and they are wrong, wrong, wrong. Case in point:



Notice the one on the left is backwards- the wide parts of the square are all in the center, instead of on the edges. And it seriously took me like 5 minutes to figure out what the hell I did wrong. Niiiiice.

Some of the details:
I used a charm pack of Mary Englebright Recipe for Friendship and 36 white on white 5 inch squares for the squares. I made a template using the internet (I can't for the life of me remember where I got the instructions or I'd link it here...but Amandajean over at Crazy Mom Quilts has some good info here ). I used the cardboard backing from a charm pack, drew a line down the middle then measured 1/4" inch above and 1/4" below that line. I drew a line from 1/4" mark to 1/4" mark and cut the thing in half. I then had 2 templates, one for the bottom and one for the top. I cut all those damn squares in half with the templates and ended up with 8 bajillion little wonky rectangles, which I sewed into the foundation squares. I just sewed them all at once, in a continuous chain thing (see the first picture). It was loooooong... I then matched them up with each other (same colors together) to make the windmills/whirlygigs. They definitely needed some trimming. By the time I trimmed them all up, I had squares that were about 8 inches. Some were smaller, some were bigger, but most were around 8 inches (I'm just not a perfectionist about this stuff...sorry). I pressed most of the seams open so that there wouldn't be a lot of bulk.

Anyway, now I want to quilt it, myself. I've recently secured a bolt of batting (sidenote: its fricking HUGE, 40 yards of batting is B.I.G.- I don't recommend this if you don't have the storage space. I had a brilliant idea to store it in a large plastic storage container- ahhh, NO...way too big) and I am planning on trying to machine quilt this one myself. I won't be doing any stippling or fancy stuff, just some straight lines. I am nervous because I love this top so much but I have to try sometime! I don't know when I will be brave enough to do this, but I'm sure gonna try...I'll make sure to post the results- disastrous or not!

Enjoy this lovely Sunday with someone you love!

2 comments:

Sheri Howard said...

I love the green you set these pin wheels together with, that is one of my favorite colors to sew with..I think it makes every color look great! Thanks for your commet!

Karen from Sew Many Ways... said...

Hi Jen,
Stopped by to say thanks for the comment on my blog. Love your quilt. Hope you have a lucky birthday!!
~Karen~