Spares?

Isn’t Instagram inspiring? My graddaughter was inspired to forward pictures of a portable quilted checkerboard that led a double life as a tic tac toe game. 

I was inspired to make it for her.

I rifled through my fabric stash and found some leftover bits from making her baby quilt! And I chopped up (upcycled) a denim shirt and pondered checkers. 

Wooden checkers! Drat!  I used to have the exact checkers for this moment, but they had been carted off to the thrift shop as we downsized once and then twice. 

Back to the thrift shop I went. 

Sure enough.  Lovely wooden checkers. Brown and cream. But not enough. At least that is what I mistakenly thought. And so I bought another set.  At a different thrift shop.  It came bundled with two other sets. I had needed 24 checkers.  I now had 96! It’s good to have spares, right? 

Bees of course

She drew me a picture when she was seven, of the way she wanted her ‘13’ quilt to look.  She wanted honeycomb, lots of honeycomb.  And dripping honey.  And a flower.  And bees of course.  That goes without saying.  

Two sides

Every quilt has two sides.  It’s not always clear which side is up and which is down. 

Weighty

Aren't traditions a wondrous thing? We have a Turned Thirteen tradition in our family.  As each of my grandchildren have teetered on the brink of teenage years I have upcycled denim into a quilt: a weighty gift befitting a weighty moment in time.  

her bouquet

Eighty years ago my young mother pieced a quilt top while she was visiting her grandmother.  The fabrics used are an amazing bouquet of prints from the first few decades of the 1900’s. Isn’t it like poetry that my mother chose a pattern called Grandmother’s Flower Garden?

with a bow

 love, tied up with a bow

snippets

 A curved coin purse made with snippets of lovely leftovers.

feelin' groovy

 Long, long ago, I pieced this patchwork. Then I folded it up and put it on a shelf. I wasn't sure how I wanted to quilt it. I wasn't sure about a backing fabric. I just wasn't sure.

A year or two later, I pulled the pieced top out of the cupboard and added a wide, dark brown border. It seemed like the right color. Many of the fabrics were etched in dark brown. But something didn't feel right. I wasn't sure what it was, but something just didn't work. 

Time did what time does and then, rather suddenly, a few weeks ago, I pulled the pieced top out of the cupboard and put it on my design wall, AKA the floor. Poor little patchwork. Maybe it wasn't the color of the border, but the width that was wrong. My husband, AKA a valuable second opinion, agreed. The brown border was 'completely overpowering.' Quick as a blink, before I could reconsider, I sliced off four and a half inches all round. The border was now the same width as the blocks making up the pattern. Blissful harmony. 

The beauty of slicing fabric from the border meant I also suddenly had fabric for a matching binding. Double happiness.

I wanted straight line quilting but I also wanted all the borders to look the same. Not little, bitty, short lines one direction and great, long, quilt length ones the other.  What to do. Hmmmm. Diagonal! That was the answer. It's pretty fun to quilt a square quilt on the diagonal. You start with the shortest line imaginable. And the lines get longer and longer and longer and longer and then shorter and shorter and shorter and presto, yahoo, you are done! 

I love this quilt. I love the colors(so 1960's) and the pattern(so mesmerizing) and the quilting(so modern) and the backing. (vintage Ikea) Long, long ago, my mother named it Pieces of Eight after pirate gold and that is an awesome name. Can a quilt have two names? No? Yes? Well, I am also thinking of this one as Feelin' Groovy.

more than anything

More than anything else, as far as wishes go, she wished she could go blueberry picking. She wished she could get in her car and drive through the mountains to Blue River and take her pails out into the woods. She thought she might meet our Mom there. (I thought she might meet a bear there!)

Our mom grew up picking wild blueberries. So did we. We shared the patch with hosts of mosquitoes, and black flies and no-see-ums. No bears that I remember but my oldest sister remembers a friend of our mother crashing out of the woods with terror stamped on every feature. If making noise is the best defense against a bear attack, she was positively invincible. 

I'm sorry I didn't think of making this quilt the moment my sister mentioned our Mom and blueberries. Sometimes I need neon lights and a marching band to wake up and smell the coffee. But the moment a quilt appeared before my glazed eyes I rushed to my sewing cupboard. A few years ago, my sister had given me a quilters panel with bears on it. Hazah!!! Perfect! I phoned the nearest quilt shop to see if they had blueberry inspired fabric but Covid had closed their doors permanently. I phoned another store and another. No blueberry fabric was to be found. I trolled about online and finally found some but the shipping time was six weeks!! And that was just an estimate. 

Fortunately, desperation saved the day. I cast my net further afield and turned up a quilt shop in a nearby town, a shop I didn't even know existed. They had a smidge of blueberry fabric left but were closing in less than an hour. Was it a fools errand to lurch out of the house, just as every sensible person was hastening homeward? Gamely, my husband agreed to drive. He gripped the steering wheel and headed off, changing lanes and taking back alleys. I gripped the door handle and breathed shallowly. 

But we were triumphant. I spent the weekend slicing and dicing and piecing and pinning. When the new week dawned, I had a moment of clarity. I had tried every possible fabric combination and there was no other possible way forward except to have more blueberry fabric. Not much. Just a smidge really. Likely just the amount that had been LEFT ON THE BOLT by me!!! 

I drove back to the shop myself. Sadly, I had not paid attention during my husbands wild race to the store and it was as though I had never been there before. I completely lost my inner compass before I let my phone help.

Amazingly, they still had the snippet of blueberry fabric I had unwisely left behind. And it was reduced in price now because it was a scrap. I could have kissed it. I staggered out to my car with a giant roll of quilt bat and a teeny tiny wisp of fabric.

The backing is a bunch of black bears boldly browsing....... That fabric was from my sister too!! I'm telling you, this quilt was meant to be hers!

 I folded the finished quilt into a postal box and put my faith in Canada Post. They didn't let me down.

capital letters

Babies are big news. This quilt says, "It's a GIRL in capital letters."

perhaps another

Isn't Pinterest an Aladdin's Cave of Wonders?

While clicking and scrolling there blissfully one evening, I came upon a quilted bag that stood out from the rest of the pencil cases, quilted pouches and cosmetic bags. There were enough photo angles of it to see that ten squares of fabric had been sewn into a zig-zag grid with seams that interlocked like magic. I was in!

Sewing the first one was fun, like figuring out a puzzle.

And once I had it assembled, oh joyous day, I discovered that it opened up as wide as a whale's mouth. No more rifling by braille in the dark depths for tweezers or a nail clipper that is somehow missing in action.

I had a stash of charm squares that divided temptingly into the makings for five more.

If one was wonderful, wouldn't a bunch be better?

Gifts!

I sewed them in an assembly line over several days in little pockets of time.

Little endless pockets of time it seemed.

For some reason, I had to make myself finish them.

I even vowed to never make another.

Strange how mass producing something seemed to drain the joy.

Looking at the pictures now, a few weeks later I feel the same spark of interest again.

Perhaps another charm pack....

voila

I came upon a charm-pack wedged in the very bottom of a box of fabric. Now who was the clever soul that thought up charm-packs? Or their name so apt? And for goodness sake, who thought of sewing them together like this to make a bag? All those zig-zag edges interlock in the most fascinating way. Who says you don't use math in your every day life?

A few blocks sewn together and voila! A generously sized cosmetic bag/travel bag/storage pouch.

I love this little bag so much I have the beginnings of five more. I could have used the blocks to make a lap quilt. A lap quilt or six fabulously floral bags. Hmmmm. Yup. The bags have it.

bite-sized

I've stitched up a batch of little zippered pouches. They have four corners but create a three sided shape. Isn't math marvelous?

Some zip up to the point and some zip down from the point. Variety is the spice of life. Good thing too because I never gave the direction of the zipper a thought when I began.

Once I did give the zipper a thought, I tried placing one in a side seam instead of a center. It is the zipper then that causes this little pouch to be the shape of a triangle. When the zip is open, the bag is flat. Sheesh. Who knew.

These little quilted pouches all in a row remind me of samosas. Bite-sized quilting. A little quilted treat.