A link to this tutorial landed in my inbox, and it looked interesting. I love disappearing blocks, where you make a big block and then cut it up to make something different. So I made this one just for fun.

Meanwhile, a friend asked if I could spare any orphan blocks. I hope she has plenty of room for them!

I didn’t count them, but I did note that they varied in size from about 2″ x 2.5″ to 30″ square. She agreed to take the triangles, too. I put a few up on the design wall just for fun. I hope she likes variety!

This is the oldest block in the stack. I made a series of these quilts in the very early 1980s. Yikes!

And I added the block I made today to the stack, so the collection spans 40 years.

I recently took a class, along with some friends, at Calla Lily Quilts in Greensboro. Here’s the result:

Strip Quilt, 60″ x 80″ (yes, I forgot to remove the row tags before the photo)

I limited the palette to blues and greens with sparks of orange and yellow, and I like the result.

The blocks are built on fusible interfacing, which makes them stable but a bit thick. That plus having 12 fabrics come to a point at some of the intersections…

caused me to get out the leather mallet and board I use to pound those seams flat where they meet!

This top is going to the friend who quilts our group’s donations for Flying Horse Farms, so you won’t be seeing the finished product here. I hope it will be a cheerful surprise for some kid at the camp.

So, have you made any strip quilts? Did you use a base, and if so what was the material? Any suggestions?

And by the way, I used scraps for this but look at what was left!

Of course we all know that old story.

Yes, I’m familiar with the “don’t ask me to hem your pants” mantra, but my church asked those who could to host activities as a fundraiser, so I offered a mending clinic. My blogging friend Mariss, in South Africa, teaches mending, so I thought I could, too. If you click on this link, you’ll see that her mending class is much more structured than mine!

I just told people to bring what they wanted to mend and we’d figure it out. Most of us had fun! Here are a few of the successes:

This older commercial quilt had been attacked by a dog; the patch was cut from a piece of fabric I quilted years ago.

There was a little hole in this favorite T shirt, so the owner covered it with a pretty coordinating fabric that ended up looking like a badge or pin.

This fleece blanket had somehow been split down the middle; the owner fixed it by sewing wide binding to both sides.

Another woman patched her jeans in multiple places, but I failed to get a picture of her her work.

And despite all the mending fun, I got the binding on this little art quilt.

Circle from Ankara fabric, 45″ x 45″

Have you done any mending lately? And BTW, we didn’t hem any pants!

As in very little, 8″ x 10″. I joined a group of friends to learn to make a collage from one of Laura Heine’s kits. We were warned to choose one of her small “Whatevers” so we could finish in one afternoon.

“Amazing Truck”, 8″ x 10″

This truck full of flowers was attractive but a bit too SS&G, as my Mother would have said (Sweet, Simple, & Girlish). So I added an alien who had been dumped out of his spaceship but landed gently on the flowers. He’ll be up and walking again by the time the truck stops.

This was a fun exercise and I probably will make one of Laura Heine’s larger collages using my own fabric. It’s a nice thing to do with friends.

And now for the experiment. You may recall that one of my groups made these blocks:

I decided to make mine into a little wall hanging–in this instance about 24″ square, so bigger than the one with the truck!

I first tried an experiment with some scraps

It worked, so I made a “dimple” in the circle I cut from the strip blocks.

Nip, 24″ x 24″

I quilted this but haven’t bound or faced it because it was just an experiment. I may never “finish” it, or I may use it to try a new edge-finish technique.

Have you tried quilt collage? Laura Heine or other? Did you enjoy it?

I just finished this quilt top and this is the last you will see of it, because a friend quilts all our group’s quilts for Flying Horse Farms. She even binds them, so after I give her the top, backing, batting, and binding, I’m done! Such a deal, right?

Although I like this quilt, I can’t really recommend the pattern because of the way it’s printed. The layout is clever, but the publisher obviously wanted to save paper and ink so the illustrations aren’t placed with the text–you have to keep going to the next page to see what they’re talking about! Thus a pattern that should have been easy was kind of a pain.

Quilt Stats

Name: Tranquility

Finished size: 60″ x 70″ (which was a 6-yard quilt, not 3-yard)

Pattern by: Fabric Cafe, from the book Make It Modern With 3-Yard Quilts

Pieced by: me

To be quilted and bound by my friend Jerri!