Red White & Blue

On my design wall:

I'm trying to decide if there needs to be a space between the center medallion and the smaller blocks.  It's pretty visually intense without the space.

21 Pounds of Neckties...

My husband Dave is an odd sort of romantic.  One year, he bought me a rock tumbler for our anniversary because I always wanted one growing up, and my Dad wouldn't buy me one.  After I fired the thing up, I learned why: a rock tumbler sounds pretty much exactly like a bunch of rocks in a blender, and it takes like a MONTH of constantly running it to polish any rocks.  Seriously, you could hear that thing OUTSIDE.  But I digress.

The UPS man brought a huge box to my doorstep a few days ago.  I dragged it indoors--it was really heavy, and it felt like a big box of laundry.  I joked that it was a box full of socks. (Actually, I wouldn't have been all that surprised if it WAS a box of socks).  I emailed DandeDave at work, and he said, "Stay OUT of that box!" and, "it weighs 21 lbs. according to the shipping notice."

We've been joking all week about the 200 pairs of socks he got me for Valentine's Day.  Last night, he said that no two pairs of socks were alike, and there was one extra sock with no mate-- and that the fun was I get to match up the pairs of socks.  I failed to see the romance in this proposition.

Here's what's really inside the box:

 

...and now you know what 21 lbs. of neckties looks like.   I had mentioned on Facebook over the holidays that I loved a certain dahlia tree skirt made of silk ties.  Now I'm pondering though...do I want a tree skirt, or do I want a luxurious silk coverlet with a giant dahlia medallion?  I'm the proud owner of 200 ties...surely that's enough to get the job done, if I can keep DandeDave out of them.

LeMoyne Medallion

This is currently on my design wall. It's making concentrating on anything else in my life fairly challenging:

The star "petals" are strip pieced, and I haven't sewn the strips together to make the big diamonds, so everything doesn't quite match up yet. I'm still enthralled by it. I don't even think I am going to substantially change the arrangement.

This is going to be the medallion of a quilt that will feature smaller LeMoyne stars each made from one of the individual fabrics featured in the large star.   The quilt is for my son, Joey, who requested that it be red, blue, and have stars.

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Finished Object - Lacy Moebius Cowl

This is a little neck warmer I knitted from my own hand-spun yarn. I got the fiber at Kanawha City Yarn Co. The fiber is a blend of wool, silk, and banana fiber.



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Finished Object- a quilt for Emily

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Signature Motif

I read an article a while back about how 19th Century quilters sometimes had a motif that was their quilted "signature." Quilt historians can, or so I read, verify the work of certain notable quilters by the presence of these motifs. I am certainly not a quilter of any note, but I have thought about the whole business of signing or tagging my work so that my heirlooms can be identified when I'm too old to remember what I had for breakfast. I have used those iron-on computer labels, but my personal thought is that they are ugly, they feel weird, and I feel like I am ruining my beautiful quilt. So I thought about this motif idea for a while, sketched a few things, and ended up with this:



My online "persona" is Dandelion, so my motif ended up being a dandelion seed carried on the wind.

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Squaring up

I'm sure when I'm sewing these blocks together, the 2 hours I just spent squaring them up will not feel nearly so much like a waste as it did when I was in the middle of it.  My normal MO is to try to "fudge" it when I'm sewing and then square up the top at the end.  This comes, foreseeably, with mixed results.

Today's design wall - disappearing 9-patch, all squared up and, of course, rearranged slightly: