Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Distracted Again

It's finally occurred to me I'm going to lose my sewing room so I felt a surge of inspiration to do some quilting. I originally planned to make a T-shirt quilt but changed my mind when I realized I was missing some old high school shirts; I must have another box kicking around somewhere.

So I pulled out my go-to quilt book and cast about for another project. I could, of course, make this quilt project that I planned in April, but I actually designed that specifically to match the master bedroom in this house. Now that we're moving, that project makes a lot less sense.

I pulled my go-to quilt book off the shelf and noticed a drawing for a quilt I had wanted to make way back in about 2002. The book gave directions to make a lap quilt with tiny 3" blocks and I wanted to convert it to a queen size quilt with 6" blocks so I thought maybe I'd go play with Electric Quilt. It's always nice to be able to check for the proper amount of fabric before you start a project.

Then I thought it would be ever so much better if I had the actual fabric images in the program, so I hauled the fabric down to the scanner and made scans. It worked great. Finally prepared, I struggled to put the design into Electric Quilt because the quilt design is a combination of blocks and strips. The program is pretty much designed to plan either strip quilts or block quilts, not a combo. So then I started looking for another design that would work with the fabric.

When I woke up sick Monday morning, I knew my plans for countertop slab shopping would be delayed. I don't share colds if I don't have to. So I continued to scan fabric and play with the program.

By Monday evening, Jeff relocated the scanner to my sewing room and I spent several hours pulling down piles of fabric and scanning them. At this point, I've scanned about half my cotton quilting fabric. Despite my impatience, I had to take a pause when my shoulder informed me it had had enough of that repetitive activity and it was time to do something different. So, armed with images of half my fabric, I went and played in Electric Quilt.

I don't actually know if I'll make any of these quilts. I hope so. But it is fun to play. I'm not going to show them all, I've made at least a dozen designs. But, if any of my followers are quilters, I'd be happy to share the quilt instructions, if you'd like. Oh, and most of the quilts have silly names as placeholders because it was better than the boring descriptive names I was originally using, like "purple rust quilt."

After designing about a dozen quilts, it occurred to me on the original quilt, I could just substitute those strips with repeating blocks made of the same fabrics. I finally managed to enter the project into Electric Quilt. And now that I've done so, I don't know that I like it. It's very busy and those dark purple blocks are definitely not doing anything for me. I may play with it some more once I scan more of my fabrics, or I may just move on to one of the other designs I made.

4 comments:

  1. Are you spending much time at your new house? How is Prineville?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nope. Not yet. Jeff is super busy with election stuff and I'm trying to do what I can to downsize in Portland. Though, rather unsuccessfully this week. I think we'll spend a lot more time there after the November midterms.

      Delete
  2. You might be interested in this:
    https://womensworkquilts.blogspot.com/

    and this: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=caia.ark:/13960/t6xw5jf80;view=1up;seq=10

    ReplyDelete