An unexpected turn of events

January 21, 2014 | sandralouise

There’s a winter wonderland going on outside in my neck of the woods today, which has given me a welcome day off! I hope to get some sewing in or maybe a little bit of work on my striped garter-stitch baby blanket:

Of course, it’s far more realistic that there’ll be a lot of shoveling in my future …

Hope you’re staying warm wherever you are.

XOXO,
Sandra

Making the L block

January 13, 2014January 14, 2014 | sandralouise

Our chapter of the Louisville Modern Quilt Guild plans to have a booth at Quilter’s Day Out March 15. Back in November, our challenge was to make 12-inch blocks using the colors of the Modern Quilt Guild logo, which if you’re interested, you can find here. You can see some of the blocks the members made here.

After putting up the blocks on a design wall, we thought it would be a great idea to make four additional blocks, each one featuring an initial of our guild name. I volunteered to make the L. And, in typical fashion, I procrastinated doing this until the day before it was due.

I had some ideas in my head, but wasn’t sure exactly how I wanted to size things. I had several 1.5-inch strips left over from the block I made for the quilt, so I knew I wanted to use those up.

Going into my trusty Excel, I resized the columns and rows to get an even grid, and drew a box around a 12×12 section. Then I used Excel’s border feature to create the shape of the L.

Once I was happy with the shape, it was just a matter of plotting colors. I didn’t worry about getting too accurate here, just something that would represent each one. Here’s what I came up with:

I wanted to use a little of each color and I liked the idea of the letter standing out from a rainbow of colors. But since there are only 10 colors in the logo, and this will be a 12-inch block, that meant I had two spaces left over. I thought about making the L a little funky by making the bottom squares white, but I just didn’t like it.

Then I tried repeating the gray colors on the end since there was so little of them. Still, it just didn’t quite work. So I tried mixing the colors, which worked much better.

It’s much more interesting than just straight lines of color, and it solves the problem of repeats. All I had to do then was count the cells and add 1/2 an inch (for seam allowances) to let me know how long to cut each color per strip. Here’s how it worked out: (I added another color to the dark green stripe, which I had forgotten to do before.)

1: Dk Orange: 3.5, 4.5; Lt. Gray: 5.5

2: Yellow: 2.5; Lt. Orange: 5.5; Dk Olive: 5.5

3: Dk. Gray: 1.5, 1.5; Lt. Gray: 1.5, 1.5; White: 10.5

4: Lt. Gray 1.5; Dk. Gray 1.5; White: 10.5

5: Dk. Turquoise 5.5, 1.5; Lt. Orange: 4.5; White: 10.5

6: Lt. Turquoise 2.5, 2.5, 1.5; Dk Gray: 5.5; White: 2.5

7: Seafoam: 3.5, 3.5, 1.5; Lt. Gray: 3.5; White: 2.5

8: Dk. Olive: 4.5, 4.5, 1.5; Lt. Turquoise: 1.5; White: 2.5

9: Lt. Olive: 4.5, 1.5, 1.5; Dk. Orange: 4.5; White: 2.5

10: Seafoam: 3.5; Yellow: 6.5, 1.5; White: 2.5

11: Dk. Gray: 6.5, 2.5; Lt. Turquoise: 4.5

12: Lt. Gray: 7.5; Dk. Turquoise: 5.5

Then I separated each color so I’d know how much to cut of each one:

Dk. Orange: 3.5, 4.5, 4.5

Lt. Orange: 5.5, 4.5

Dk. Gray: 1.5, 1.5, 5.5, 6.5, 2.5

Lt. Gray: 1.5, 1.5, 3.5, 7.5

Dk. Turquoise: 5.5, 1.5, 5.5

Lt. Turquoise: 2.5, 2.5, 1.5, 1.5, 4.5

Seafoam: 3.5, 3.5, 1.5, 3.5

Dk. Olive: 4.5, 4.5, 1.5, 5.5

Lt. Olive: 4.5, 1.5, 1.5

Yellow: 2.5, 6.5, 1.5

White: 10.5, 6.5

Here’s how it looks on the screen all together:

Then it was time to cut and sew. I placed them together to see how they’d look, just to make sure I was happy with it.

Some of the strips wound up uneven in my attempts to trim and square pieces up, but that’s ok with me. The wonkiness just made it feel even more modern!

Here’s how it looked with the blocks our members made, which we plan to turn into a quilt banner for our booth at Quilter’s Day Out.

Pretty cool, when put all together, isn’t it?

Overall, I’m really happy with how my L block turned out and even think it might be fun to do as a quilt-along. What do you think? Would you be interested in having blocks like this to do an alphabet sampler quilt-along? Let me know in the comments.

Hope you’re all having a great week. I’m also making progress on my latest charity blanket. I’ll have photos of that soon.

XOXO,
Sandra

Easy striped garter blanket

January 6, 2014 | sandralouise

I’m slowly getting back into the swing of things after a nasty cold and the resulting lethargy took me out for the remainder of 2013. When I wasn’t asleep or staring like a zombie at the television, I did manage to start a new baby blanket for charity. Take a look:

I decided to make this blanket larger than my last one, but still small enough for a baby or toddler. I got the idea from one I saw on Pinterest, made by LaLaKa and found on her Etsy store. I’ll admit, what particularly interested me was that all I had to do was knit, which was the perfect mindless project for my infirmed state of the past few weeks.

For my color choices, I’m using what left of my washable wool/acrylic stash, the result of which I hope will read neither boy nor girl, though I suppose most people would consider the dark rose color more girly. You can see the color change from dark to light blue a little better in this shot:

The pattern is quite simple, I cast on 200 stitches and knit every row until the skein runs out, then I change color. My gauge is between 4.5 and 5 sts per inch on size 8 needles. After the white there’ll be a little bit of yellow, and I’ll eventually work my way back to the darker blue to give the blanket some symmetry. Here’s a closer look:

The yarns have been in my stash for quite awhile, and a couple of the skeins are missing labels, but it’s mostly Emu Superwash and Brunswick Yarns Wintuk Orlon for the darker blue. Definitely easy knit and easy care.