Sunday, December 09, 2007

This one has everything!


Piecing! Applique! Drafted pattern! Matching points! Borders! Sashing! Cornerstones! The Grinch! Everything but Little Cindy Lou Who, that is.

I could get used to this insomnia stuff if it means I'm cranking out a quilt top a day. I love the Grinch and I've had this fabric hanging around for several years and never did anything with it. At 3:30 this morning I decided I needed to clear my brain by working on something traditional and mindless. Lots of straight stitching and nothing that stains clothes. I drafted out a quick pattern for the size of the Grinch motifs (they aren't exactly square so I had to do a pattern first) and started cutting. I also had to figure out how wide to make the borders and sashing since I had a limited amount of the green print. Thank heaven for the graph paper generator at http://incompetech.com/graphpaper/ or I'd have woken the hub up rooting around for my pad of pre-printed stuff. Some good murder mysteries on tv and zombie-like piecing and pressing, and voila! 6.5 hours later I had a finished quilt top. Now my brain and creativity has had a chance to rest and sort itself out so I can get back to doing the stuff I love to do. It seems like if I don't throw in some simple stuff once in a while my brain just gets heavier and heavier with ideas and they get all jumbled up together. I think the mindless sewing sort of lets the bad ones go and the good ones float to the top. I get my sewing fix in and I come out of it with clearer ideas of what I want to do for myself. Commercial cotton prints, 46"x54".

I'm thinking some more silk screening or gel printing is next in line this week.

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