Quilty Pleasures: Kansas City Star Sampler Finished

I am a great starter of quilts, but finishing them is something totally different. I get all angsty and second guess myself and it's just easier to place the almost finished quilt in a bag and start something else. People who can complete a quilt project from start to finish with none of this drama are in my Hall of Fame, but that's just not me. (Honesty time: It's been eight months since I did the layout for this quilt.) Dang!

So when I finish something, it's usually because someone has gently twisted my arm or the old Catholic Guilt Machine started drilling into my psyche, creating more angst than not completing the project would.

You might remember a few of the blocks in this quilt because I featured them here and here. I even showed you the layout here.

So it's done. This was a Block of the Month project, and I didn't want to use a traditional setting, so adapted one I saw on the GenX Quilters' site.

The quilting was done by the excellent Claudette Maitland, who owns Turquoise Angel Quilting in Angel Fire, NM, and each block has been quilted differently. I asked Claudette to quilt the negative space in the center with wavy lines about a hand's width apart. After I got the quilt back, I decided to add a few more quilting lines to the center to make it more interesting.

 

In the larger photo you probably thought the black background was solid, but surprise, it's a pin dot! 

If I were to do this setting again, I would have added six more blocks, with the first row on each end filled with four blocks, then three, two, and one. 

Quilty Pleasures-When Someone With ADHD Takes Up Paper Piecing

At Threadbear, my local quilt shop, we are working on a Block of the Month project from the book, Hard Times, Splendid Quilts by Caroline Cullinan McCormick.

It's paper piecing, something new and kind of daunting especially for me, an early Ritalin junkie.

The term back then was hyperactive, and I was an easily distracted, always needing something to do, smart-mouthed trial to my parents, my brother and my teachers. As I matured, I learned to channel that energy into productive projects, a successful consulting business and a fun job helping teens to get ready for college. And to keep it interesting, I made clothing and quilts in my spare time.

Paper piecing is good for me: It satisfies a need for order. You see, I was the kid who did her algebra homework on graph paper, one digit or symbol per square. It helped to make sense of what was happening and if I made a mistake, it was easier to find in all its linear neatness. It was a successful coping technique for a hyper kid.

Sewing little fabric bits helps to train my mind to focus: One Step at a Time. But it is also maddening, because the opportunities for error are there, right in front of me, if I lose that focus.

Case in point:

The triangle with the pretty 30's fabric should actually be black pindots, plus, it shouldn't be joined to the black pindot square.  I'd been binge-watching Scandal and allowed myself to be distracted. After sewing the units together, I realized, "Hey! This isn't right!"

Since paper piecing requires the stitch length to be shorter, using the seam ripper becomes a Zen experience.

"Be in the moment, Grasshopper," I say to myself, picking away at the teensy stitches.

There. Now they are correct.

Eventually, the tiny pieces of fabric are placed accurately on their paper foundations, the tattered paper underneath repaired with tape, but still falling apart after all that taking apart and putting it back again. The units are sewn into their correct places and they finally look pretty good. You wouldn't know what a wreck it is underneath, would you?

At our paper piecing group yesterday I volunteered that it would be an amazing feat if I could put together at least one block without having to do any unsewing.

And I realized that maybe it wasn't my ADHD causing the mistakes, because almost everyone admitted to making at least one mistep in each of their blocks.

So it's good to know that I am not alone. The paper piecing continues.

Caroline Cullinan McCormick

Quilty Pleasures Monday: Depression Era Blocks, Paper Pieced

Back during The Great Depression, readers could find patterns for clothing or quilt blocks in their local newspapers. The Kansas City Star was one of those newspapers, and they didn't even charge for their complete patterns. Caroline Cullinan McCormick decided to write a book about some of these blocks from the newspaper and adapted many of the designs for paper piecing.

ThreadBear, my local quilt store, decided to offer a Block of the Month program based on this book. So we have bought the book and just finished our first block.

What I like about ThreadBear's BOM is we may choose whatever fabrics we want. I decided to go with a black pindot background and for this month I chose Denyse Schmidt's fabrics from her Shelburne Falls collection.

This fabric looks so pretty and fresh and this block came together nicely.

How do we get such precise results? For my friends who are not quilters, it's called paper piecing, kind of like painting by the numbers. Here is how it looks on the back. Each number shows the order in which the fabric is placed on the paper pattern. Et, voila! It looks perfectly perfect! Just what this ADHD person needs to keep her head on straight.

No, ThreadBear didn't pay me to write about their BOM. I just like their store.

Now I am on my way to meet up with our Modern Quilt Group. We are going to muddle through my presentation on sewing giant hexies by machine, the class I took from Jacquie Gering at QuiltCon.