Quilt Block Preparation

After spending a couple frustrating hours stripping paint this morning, Sharon decided to take the afternoon off and do something fun. So she spent this cold, snowy afternoon preparing for sewing her historic quilt blocks.

She went into full organization-mode and printed out the rolling cutting directions and templates for all 43 blocks and organized them in a binder in plastic sheet protectors.

Then she went the further obsessive step and made a spreadsheet listing the blocks and their fabric cuts. Then she made a separate table for each fabric which listed the blocks which used particular size cuts. Each table looks like this:

She's planning to work from the widest cuts to the thinnest.  She's hoping by coming up with the list of blocks that use, for example, 2¾" navy/rust strips, that she'll be able to cut those pieces all at once and hopefully waste less fabric that way.

Paint Stripping: How Much is Enough?

Sharon has been trying to decide how much paint stripping to do in the master bedroom. She spent another 14+ hours this week carefully going over half the the woodwork in the room, scraping and digging paint out of nooks and crannies.

But there is always the decision about how much is enough. There are some spots that refuse to strip clean without removing the woodwork. The paint is so embedded in the wood the only way to remove it would be to sand down through the upper layers or dig it out, probably noticeably damaging the wood.

We'll probably have to settle for leaving these spots as is and just stain over them.

Hopefully Sharon will have the energy to spend this next week finishing up this room.

Quilt Progress

Sharon mostly finalized the quilt design for her historic reproduction block quilt, with some possible future tweaks along the way.

Here is the pallet of fabrics for this project, except for the one she ordered for the backing.

Sharon got started in earnest on this project this week. She made 30 of these blocks for the repeating squares between the historic blocks. Only 10 more to go. She was reminded why she really doesn't like working with stripes. In an attempt to get the stripes straight, some of her pieces are slightly skewed. Hopefully it will work out.

Paint Stripping Again

Sharon finally started paint stripping in the master bedroom again!

It turns out the key to getting going again is—audiobooks! She only allows herself to listen to the books when she is working upstairs either stripping paint or sewing. (She's been working on the quilt too, but that's another post.)

We thought the master bedroom was basically done, but then Sharon went all perfectionist and decided to be more thorough about removing all the bits of paint in the nooks and crannies (and wood grain). It also seems like someone filled all the little nail holes in the woodwork with something hard and white—maybe spackle or joint compound. Sharon's been trying to dig all those lumps of hard goop out so we can refill the holes with a stainable wood filler.

The progress is slow. There really isn't much to show in pictures; it looks little different than before. But if we're going to do this right, it's better to do it before we start applying stain.

Sharon's slowly working her way around the room trying to clean the woodwork to the point of being ready for stain. It is so nice to get this project moving along again.

One More Quick Pretty

When Sharon ordered the rug the other day on Overstock.com, she found this inexpensive Tree of Life tapestry, which she ordered. Today, she made it off to JoAnn fabrics to buy an inexpensive cafe rod to get it hung up.

This particular tapestry design was done by John Henry Dearle, of Morris & Co., in 1910.

On another topic, isn't that plastic thermostat controller ugly? That's thanks to our contractor and their sub-contractor, Pyramid Heating & Cooling. Sharon pretty much flipped out when she saw this awful thing on the wall. They never bothered to mention this ugly thing would be installed. If they had, we would have moved the wiring to a less-visible location. They tell us we can't cover it, because it has to be exposed to the air to work.

Craftsman Rug Research

Sharon has been saving and storing rug images for a while now and she thought it was time to share some of them. Again, excuse this post if you have no interest in period research.

There are lots of great opportunities out there to get less-expensive rugs in an appropriate style, if you're familiar with what rugs looked like back in the early-1900s. Like today, they actually had a large diversity in styles.

The two best resources for color rug images that Sharon's found are two books:

• Arts & Crafts Carpets by Malcolm Haslam published in 1991 (ISBN 0-8478-1388-6)
• Arts and Crafts Rugs for Craftsman Interiors by Linda Parry and David Cathers  published in 2010 (0-39373-320-4). 

Here are some of Sharon's favorites from those two books.

From Arts & Crafts Carpets, page 132. These designs date from 1904.

This Time For Sure!

We swapped out the rug in the dining room—again. This is the third time. We just kept trying different rugs in the room, trying to find one that worked best with the colors.

The latest burgundy and tan rug was not working—the colors were not working with the cherry-stained woodwork and the green fabric seats of the chairs. Hopefully, this new rug will be the last time!

Over the holidays Sharon ran across this rug at Overstock.com. It was much like the gold rug we bought in summer 2010, only much better colors!

While the design is not exact, it's a pretty reasonable substitute for this period Fintona Donegal rug made by Silver Studio in 1902.

This photo scanned from Arts & Crafts Carpets by Malcolm Haslam, page 88.

And the new rug coordinates much better with our furniture and our tapestries.