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Might make a good quilt

early oleander blooms in the rain

New camera!

(Expect lots of pictures as I catch up.)

This is the quilt that the Friendship Bee made for my mother. It's one of several "comfort quilts" she received since she was diagnosed with cancer. They asked me before they started about whether she would like this design, and I didn't have to think twice about it. She does. She has it on her bed, and she told me today that she loves looking at it because she sees something new every time.

(Since I've mentioned my mom's health - she is doing quite well. She started chemo last week, but she said she actually feels better than she has in some time. So so far, so good.)

I love the back.

Work in Progress

Here is the beginning of the green quilt. I doubt that this is going to be the actual layout; this is just my test to see if my idea is going to work. And I think that it is.

Incidentally, I'm probably going to end up with two green triangle quilts. I'm trimming my pairs of triangles down into two different sizes (3-1/2" and 4" finished) so obviously they aren't going to fit into the same quilt too well.

Roseville

I thought that I had posted a picture of Mom's Roseville quilt before, but I just looked, and apparently I haven't. So here is an old picture of the whole thing. (The picture below is new, though.)

center of the Roseville quilt

Mom's door

(with the Frank Lloyd Wright quilt, currently)

...and the kitchen sink

Here's the Kitchen Sink quilt... so called because it has bits and pieces of everything thrown in - including the silver rings off of our wedding cake, which I think you can make out sewn onto the red heart.

Friday update

This was really going to be a Friday Quilt Picture - I was going to post a picture of my Kitchen Sink quilt, but Hello crashed on me. So hopefully I will be able to get it posted later.

And my birthday present came today - my new camera. So I will soon have new pictures again! Yay! (I have really, really missed having a camera.) It's a Canon A510, and it's fabulous.

And speaking of green

Here, fortuitously, is another piece courtesy of reproductionfabrics.com:

Poison Greens

The color green has always been a challenge for dyers and printers. Chlorophyll, the compound that makes plants green, is unstable as a dye for wool, silk or cotton.

Early fabric dyers used a two-step method of dying green-- first with yellow (quercitron, weld, Persian berry, or chrome yellow) and then over dying with indigo or Prussian blue. Warwick green was used to achieve green detailing (stems and leaves) by painting on an indigo ‘pencil blue’ mixture containing aluminated potash (a mordant for quercitron). A quick dip in a quercitron dye bath produced the desired green with good registration.

Arsenic greens were first discovered in 1778 by Swedish chemist Karl Scheele. The colorant was very popular for interior decor, especially wallpapers. Cases of poisoning caused by arsenic in green wallpaper were documented throughout the 19th century. The cause of the illness was frequently misdiagnosed because the symptoms were so general and came on gradually. It is still unclear how the poison was absorbed. One theory is that arsenic may have been transferred into the air of damp rooms by fungi living on the wallpaper paste converting inorganic arsenic into a gas.

Emerald green dye, also known as acid green, solid green and Victoria green, was first produced in an attempt to improve on Scheele’s green. The new dye was used on mordanted cottons to produce a dramatic green (see #RR514G). Another version, Paris green, was used as a pigment for wallpaper, artificial flowers and most affectedly as an insecticide. For a brief period, emerald green was used to dye silks. This exquisite new color was immediately popular for ball gowns.

Eventually, "The Lancet", a British medical journal, spearheaded a campaign to banish arsenic greens because of the many illness and deaths attributed to the dye. By 1875, several British manufacturers had switched to arsenic free greens in wallpapers and paints. In was not until the early 1900s, that there were limits to the amounts of arsenic allowed in wallpapers in the United States. Could this emerald green color with its brief and tragic history be the origins of the term ‘poison green’?

Lakehouse

Here's that hydrangea fabric I was talking about.

It ain't easy being green

Would you believe I spent yesterday cutting green fabric again? That makes three weekends in a row. I am about to run out soon, though - I really intended to finish yesterday but I ran out of steam right before I got there. Unless I dip into Mom's stash - and she offered to let me - I only have three or four more to go. I might at least dip selectively into hers since I know she has some beautiful stuff. (So do I, actually; you ought to see all the gorgeous stuff that I didn't even remember I had!) She already let me cut a 5" strip off of a big piece of that yummy Lakehouse hydrangea fabric in green that she is intending to make a table cover out of, apparently. Anyway, next week I'm going to finish cutting my squares, but I'm also going to do at least do a few test triangles, no matter what. I want to be able to get some idea what this thing is going to look like - or rather, whether it's going to look at all like what it looks like in my head.

April showers

I haven't posted a picture of a door quilt in a while, so here's the latest one.

I want one.

The world's coolest sewing machine.

I totally want one of these. It's presumably only good for straight-line sewing, but still. If somebody finds out where they're selling these, let me know!

And where does the thread go?


(Incidentally, what I really want is one of those Berninas with the stitch regulator. Only a little over $2000 if you don't want the embroidery module, I was told!)

That book

I tried searching for "spectacular scraps" in Google images and mostly got 20 pictures of the cover of the book (which is a pretty quilt, too, if you haven't seen it). But I did find this one, which is quite nice. I know I bought my mother that book, anyway, so I just need to remember to look for it when I'm at her house tomorrow.

Possible design for my green quilt

(See #4 on the last entry for what the heck I'm talking about.) This is one of the quilts from the book "Spectacular Scraps" - I'm not saying that this is what the green quilt is going to look like, though. Actually I'm thinking of something more random, but I'm going to have a look at the book again before I actually start assembling anything.

Bermuda triangle?

Here's what I worked on at the retreat:
1. Pinwheels. I started doing this a while back because I had tons of strips and all those Thangles I bought at the quilt festival - 2" and 4" pinwheels, which means 1" and 2" half-square triangles.
2. Units for the batik blocks - squares in squares and flying geese, mostly. I have four of these left to make, but at least I have pieces of it done!
3. 5" versions of the 4" sampler blocks that are in the Ohio Star quilt, for a new project. They're red, and they came out really pretty. 5" blocks lets me go all the way up to 1.25" instead of 1" for the triangles. I made some of them the traditional way and some with 1.5" Thangles that I cut down. I really am sort of disillusioned with the Thangles, in that I can't see that they're much faster than the traditional way. Anyway, I think I came out with 10 blocks done, of the 12 I need. (I finally had to stop because all those damn triangles were making me nuts.) So I started cutting pieces for...
4. The mythical green quilt that I've been talking about doing for months. I'm cutting - you guessed it - triangles, and they're going to be all of 4" - can you believe it? I spent a couple of hours on Saturday night and another four hours on Sunday just cutting squares. I'm using all different shades of green. I'm really going to like the look, I can tell already.

Apparently, I am now known in my guild as the Tiny Triangle Lady.