Coastal Cool

I got a couple of months behind with the "My Favorite Color is Moda" quilt along on the Moda blog. I finished these two blocks, a 36" block, and a few others before the end of May but neglected to make the ones for June and July. 

Yesterday I put the pedal to the metal and cranked out 13 blocks. Not all of them are on the wall because I am trying to sew smaller sections together as I get the blocks made. This morning I finished 2 more, so now I am all caught up through the month of August. 

I am well past halfway through the blocks now, and 3 or 4 of the ones that are left are a lot more complicated. There are also 4 blocks composed of these units, which are simple enough to make but which I generally have trouble with. 

These are often times made by placing a smaller square in the corner of the larger square or other shape, drawing a line on the diagonal from corner to corner, and then sewing on that line. And I rarely get them right. I've tried sewing on the line or to the right of the line, and they always seem to be just a little off.

I CAN sew an accurate quarter-inch seam allowance, however; so it occurred to me to just cut away the excess and then sew. It doesn't eliminate the waste triangles, but now I have...

.... perfection!

I have tried the Studio 180 Corner Pop ruler and  Doug Leko's Simple Folded Corner ruler, and those both work well too; but they only eliminate the waste triangle from the larger shape. It's faster for me to use the method above. 

Life is full of trade offs. Time or fabric?

Millenium Charm

First, my profound apologies to those who commented on my post from June and who did not get a response back from me. Blogger fails to forward comment notifications on a regular basis, it seems, and it rarely occurs to me to actually look in the comment section. I just expect the notifications. I don't think I have a setting wrong anywhere because occasionally it works. I've attempted to fix it again by trying a different email address for forwarding. I wish I could get off the Google platform altogether, but I haven't had the courage to try switching to Word Press. 

Anyway, it's been a busy summer. I've been sewing as much as I can, but I haven't accomplished a whole lot. Only two quilts this year on the completed list. Doesn't bother me a bit. After I ditched the One Monthly thing, I decided to work on what I felt like on any given day. Sometimes projects came out of the closet for a day and then went back in. Sometimes I worked halfway through a project and had enough of it. Quite a few times I assembled the materials for a new project and made just one block to see how I liked it. And I have thoroughly enjoyed myself. 

The pineapple quilt is still on the frame. I finally got the rest of the errant stitching ripped out about two weeks ago. After chipping away at it for weeks and weeks, I am tired of looking at; but I'm going to have to get cracking on it again. 

My major accomplishment this week is that I have finally finished sewing together all 1,998 triangles for my Y2K quilt. If you've been quilting a long time, you may remember that at the turn of this century, many quilters wanted to make millennium quilts with 2000 pieces. I remember looking at pyramids and log cabins among other things, but my Icelandic friend and I settled on triangles. The number of rows and columns was chosen to incorporate as many as possible, which worked out to be 1,998. My plan now is to add a border and applique the last two triangles someplace in the border. Then I'll add more triangles for every year after 2000, so 23 triangles total. Then I'll add another one next year.

This is also a charm quilt, meaning every one of the 1,998 triangles is a unique fabric. Accomplishing this was no small task. In the year 2000, my collection of fabrics fell way short of this goal, so I resorted to the purchase of a 2000-piece anniversary collection of 4" squares from Keepsake Quilting. Not all of those pieces were usable however. There were duplicates; and there were some that were unusable, primarily those that were multicolored or large scale prints. I made the effort to use all the rest. 

Over the years, many triangles were added and subtracted. It was relatively easy to weed out the duplicates of the dark fabrics, but the light colored fabrics proved more challenging. So for each color group, I tried to use light colored fabrics that contained bits of the same color as its companion. For example, the lights in the yellow grouping all had touches of yellow in the light print. That made it a lot easier to weed out duplicates in each color group. 

After I got the top half of the quilt together, which was years ago, I think I came across one duplicate. I've never been able to locate it again, so maybe one day I'll have a contest and give a prize to the person who finds it. 

I used all kinds of fabrics in the quilt--batiks, stripes, dots, plaids, 30s repros, civil war repros, modern--but no solids. I also incorporated fun little novelty fabrics when I could, like this hot dog...

 

... and this golf ball and tee. My mother-in-law was a golfer, so it reminds me of her. 

All those triangle seams inevitably create a lot of bulk, so on the back I twirled quite a few of them. The bottom third of the top is all twirled, but I didn't always do that in the top two thirds. Wish I'd been more consistent about that. 

Not sure yet what I'll do for the border. Probably black, I guess, but I'll have to see what it looks like. I don't really want the center to look smaller. I also thought about tan with a black binding. For now, I'm just so happy to get the rest of the top done.