Here is the quilt for our first Hungarian grandchild, Blanka, ready for basting.
And here is a photo showing the backing fabric. The print is tiny pastel hearts. The plan is to finish it in time for our next trip to Hungary in early May. If all else fails, I figure I can stitch the label on the plane!
I think I am the only Crackpot to make the block for which Rebecca provided us with fabric at Thanksgiving. We all got the same fabrics and were challenged to make the same block, the cover block from the March/April “Quiltmaker.” The object is to see how many different variants we Crackpots can come up with. I pieced my block during our last visit to the Cute Little House. It was so much fun that I am thinking about doing a second one, making it as different as I can from this one. Of course, since we are all supposed to make our blocks independently, I probably should be keeping my effort a secret. But I can’t. So either take a quick look and then try to forget what you see, or avert your eyes now. Here it is:
Fellow Crackpots:
I write with potentially unfortunate news. The fabulous company that hosts the Crackpot Quilters’ Blog, Laughing Squid web hosting, has announced that on March 24, they will be upgrading one of the pieces of software on which this blog runs (PHP, for anyone who’s interested). This is a necessary upgrade, as the old version isn’t secure and needs to be replaced.
Unfortunately, this means that another piece of software on which this blog runs (WordPress, the actual blog program) will need to be upgraded as well, and this is something that I’m responsible for doing, not the hosting company. I actually should have done it a year ago or more, but I’ve had a few other projects in the hopper (as it were) and never got around to it.
I’m quite sure that I don’t have the time or mental energy right now to upgrade WordPress, much less to have it done by March 24, and I honestly don’t know when I will have the time. (Sometime after our taxes are done, we’ve found daycare for James, and the semester’s over, is my guess.)
I have no idea what will happen to the blog when the upgrade takes place in a week and a bit. It’s possible that it will still function just fine, though I think that’s unlikely. I doubt highly that it will vanish into the aether, though I will try to find time to make a backup just in case. My guess is that posting, commenting, etc. won’t work, but that whatever’s here will still be accessible. We’ll just have to wait and see.
My apologies for this: the blog has been far more successful than I dared hope when I started it, and nearly all of the credit goes to the rest of you, for posting and commenting and keeping it going. I really don’t want to let it slide into obscurity, so I’ll see what I can do once I clear a few things off my plate. Thanks for your patience!
pssst, Rebecca: wanna mess around with a WordPress installation? I think I can set you up a user account on the hosting plan if you want…
A small, but enthusiastic, group from the Fiber Arts Guild met here on Wednesday night. This is what caused the most comment.
Pretty cool that the artistic folks appreciate the chairs we love! OK, one of them grew up in Norway…
It’s been a while, but I finally finished two more projects for the online class. Both of these are made of paper towel fabric. First, the vase, which followed the directions for the class project. (Except for a minor measurement error. Duh! Don’t use rulers after 8:30 p.m.)
Damp paper towels are dyed/painted, and then left to dry. After they are dry, the dyed towels are torn and the torn bits are fused to muslin. The muslin is then fused to a felt base. Then it is stitched in a grid to make sure everything holds together and to add some texture. A cotton lining is fused to a heavy-duty interfacing (Pellon 72), and the paper towel fabric is lightly fused to the other side of the interfacing. The edges of the vase sides are covered with a satin stitch. Each of the sides is stitched to the triangular base with a wide zigzag. Then the vase sides are hand stitched together. The last step is adding the beads. Deciding exactly what I wanted to do about the beads was what took the longest. I had to put some marbles in the bottom of the vase so the weight of the beads wouldn’t pull the it over.
This paper towel fabric has quite an interesting texture so I decided to try to make a box of my own design. After determining the shape, I followed the same procedure as with the orange vase and created the outer box.
This is the outside of the box before I stitched the sides together.
This is the inside of the box before I stitched the sides together.
I wanted to have an inner tray so I glued some supports on the corners after I stitched the sides together. Here is a view of all the pieces from the top.
Showing the tray:
From the side:
Another fun project!