Crackpot Quilters’ Blog

Merry Belated Christmas, fellow Crackpots!

I’m sorry to say that it didn’t occur to me until very late in the process (like, the day before we were going to head down for our post-Christmas visit) that all five Crackpots wouldn’t be together in the same place at the same time this year. So the cumulative impact of my Crackpot Christmas Gift/Project was somewhat diluted, I’m afraid. I’m hoping this post will help the situation.

If you’re reading this, you know that I made notebook covers for Mead “composition notebooks” for each of you. This was partly because I thought it was a cool idea, and partly because I was looking for an excuse to play and experiment with some small-scale piecing ideas. Here are the four notebooks:

Rebecca’s notebook should have been titled “It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time.” It’s a three-strip Fence Rail block, pieced with some striped fabrics I had that I didn’t know what to do with. The idea is that the stripes would blend into one another, looking like one striped fabric. It kind of worked:

Marty’s notebook is a pretty standard Log Cabin block, which used a set of fat sixteenths (!) I got from somewhere. I think they’re reproduction fabrics, but I had a heck of a time thinking of what I could do with sixteenths. The gradual shading of the fabrics seemed to lend themselves to a Log Cabin:

Ann’s notebook is a crazy quilt, using various bright scraps I had lying around, mostly from various kids’ quilts, but also from a few other projects, including a pillow I made for her, and the famous Top Secret Round Robin Crackpot Project. The center patches are from a Laurel Burch fabric I bought at Field’s a while ago and haven’t figured out what to do with:

And finally, Nancy’s notebook uses string piecing with scraps from the four baby quilts I’ve been involved with. This was the first one I did (after the muslin mock-up to make sure I had the measurements right), and I had to tear out and re-piece the lining and the pocket for the notebook covers three times to get it right. Topology is hard:

I had a great time doing these – I hope you enjoy them!

P.S. once you’ve read this, could you leave a comment? Once I know everyone’s read it, I’ll take the password off the post so that The Whole World can see it.

Okay, as promised and quite a bit late, Ann and Nancy’s magnum opus, the Interlocking Squares quilt, with its matching pillowcases:

There really isn’t much to say about it that hasn’t already been said, except that our cat is working very hard to alleviate the shocking lack of cat hair on the quilt. But now it’s been blogged for all posterity (I suspect that the quilt will LONG outlive the blog!) and I can move on to blogging other things. Stay tuned for curtains, English patchwork over papers, and an undisclosed Secret Project!

So, I’ve never really been into applique, but I think that is about to change. I discovered the wonderful portable-ness of applique while working on a sheep quilt for friends of ours who just had a baby girl in July. It’s a really cute pattern from Quiltmaker. It calls for the sheep to be made out of fleece and then machine appliqued onto the block, but I was not confident that I have good enough machine skills for that, so I decided to hand applique with blanket stitch. I’m very happy with how it turned out, and I discovered that it was really nice because a little sheep block fit easily into the diaper bag and I could take it along and work on it when the boys were busy playing at the playground and didn’t need any help from me. Wonderful! So, here’s the sheep quilt…

Well, as life goes for a crackpot, one thing led to another. Once I had done that applique, I decided to try a little more, this time using freezer paper templates. And, if you’re going to try some applique, it might as well be something fun, right? So, in colors that coordinate with Andrew’s room, I am now working on a wall hanging that includes a dump truck…

a flatbed…

and a backhoe…

I’m finishing up a crane now and will then put them together for a wall hanging in Andrew’s room. It’s lots of fun, so you can expect more applique from me in the future, though probably not flowery things!

As was the case with Cathy’s last post, I have a Formerly Secret Project that can now be revealed, since we have been to visit Cathy and Chris and have delivered their anniversary present.
Crackpots will recall that a completed quilt top, the “Interlocking Squares” pattern in brown and green on a cream background, was presented to C&C on the occasion of their wedding and then promptly reclaimed so that Nancy and I could quilt and finish it. That was (blush) five years ago. Nancy and I had hoped to be able to deliver the finished quilt for their anniversary this year, but a few months ago it became clear that was not going to happen. So, like a true ever-resourceful Crackpot, I went to Plan B – two pairs of pillowcases to match the as-yet-to-be-delivered quilt. Here’s the first one:

A requirement I set for myself was that I was allowed to purchase only the cream background fabric; the designs had to be produced using only the existing scraps from the quilt top. Since all the extra fabric had already been cut into 1.75″ wide strips, that limited me somewhat. For example, I couldn’t do anything Celtic, since that would require fabric cut on the bias. I came up with this design by noodling around with the “interlocking squares” concept, and it just fell into place. Then came the fun part of deciding how to piece it without any inset seams. It proved to be both possible and fun!

This set was actually the first pair I made. Some of the scraps I had left over were extra stripey triangles that were used for the setting triangles in the quilt top. I started playing with them, and this pattern just happened. If you look at it closely, you will see a truly weird way to piece concentric squares – weird, that is, unless you happen to have 16 already pieced triangles of just the right combinations of fabrics!

P.S. to all, and a thank you to Cathy – This uploading business is actually pretty intuitive. I managed to write this post without referring back to Cathy’s instructions on how to use the blog.

Yay! I got Nancy’s thank-you card yesterday, which means that she’s seen this, which means that I can now post about it. Here’s my birthday present for Nancy, a wall hanging made from the block “Nancy’s Nosegay,” which appears on Nancy’s birthday on the Quilt-Block-A-Day perpetual calendar!

This was my first project that involved quilting that wasn’t in the ditch, so that opened up a whole new world of finding, modifying, and marking quilting patterns. Here’s a detail of the quilting in the setting triangles:

Now, I’m not known for getting holiday presents of any sort out in a timely manner, but this one was a real winner: I originally intended it for Nancy’s birthday last year, but by early May had only completed the top. So, I sent her the top, along with a postage-paid return envelope. She sent it back to me, and I finished it for her birthday this year – still not getting it done in time, mind you, but close enough. Hence the explanation on the label I sewed onto the back:

Let it never be said that I didn’t document my failings!

This is the Mariner’s Compass wall hanging I made for Jim, the Executive Director of the local social service agency I am involved with. The pattern is from Judy Mathieson’s book Mariner’s Compass Quilts: New Directions. It is paper pieced. The hardest part was trying to get the points to come out at the right place. I designed my own corner squares to paper piece.

I chose this pattern because Jim is a sailor and he led the floundering agency in a new direction. The trickiest part was figuring out what color to make it. I asked Jim’s 18-year-old son what colors were in their house, and all he could come up with was blue. Not terribly helpful…

YOIKS! IT LOOKS LIKE ONE OF THE POINTIES IS REVERSED! I CAN’T BELIEVE IT!

I would like to make another one in colors to go in our house.

Not to be outdone by my mother and mother-in-law, I have finally uploaded my own image! This is the completed quilt top to my foundation Noah’s Ark quilt that I am making for Baby Oberreuter-Charzinski 2, due at the end of May. I sewed all the rows together, did the sashing, and added to borders this morning while the boys were at the coffee shop. It’s amazing what you can get done without any small people underfoot!