Sewing!

I ran across Sonnet of the Moon while I was searching for bento box quilt images, and have enjoyed browsing the blog archives. Crystal has made so many gorgeous quilts that utilize traditional American quilt squares in bright, vivid colors! I'm still searching for my own style, but I love how neatly all of the points match up on Crystal's quilts and how well she can arrange colors. Look at the range of complementary greens, yellows, and browns in the Couchant on a Field Vert quilt! Inspired by the pretty quilt blocks, I decided to use fabric scraps to make a block from my Japanese quilting book last night. When I have enough, I'm going to sash them and make a quilted rug for the kitchen, so that I don't keep denting the floor when I drop things. If I put a double thickness of batting inside and make the rug wide enough to cover the floor between the sink and the oven, it shouldn't slip around.

( Picture beneath the cut )

Look! Most of the points match up! I'm so happy about that! I made this block by cutting each patch rather than strip piecing, carefully measured each piece, carefully sewed the pieces together with a 1/4" seam, and when some of the seams didn't match, resewed the pieces so that they would. Hurrah! Next time, I'll try strip piecing.

I've finished the brown-and-gold lap quilt!

( Pictures underneath the cut )

Yesterday, troisroyaumes and her mother had bluerabbit, S., and myself over for an amazing dinner celebrating 추석 (harvest moon festival) and troisroyaumes' birthday, and while I was slipstitching the edge shut, someone asked if the quilt was done. I said no, one more side needed to be stitched, and then unfolded it to do the next side, and found out that actually, all four border edges were done! Yay!

The pattern is from a book on quilt block patterns; you can see that the seams rarely align, and many of the patches are of different sizes (the small squares are supposed to be the same size; the big squares are supposed to be the same size; and the rectangles are supposed to be the same size), so I machine-quilted more or less along the vertical and horizontal seam lines, instead of diagonally across the square patches, as the original pattern called for. The fabric came from the super discounted bolt-end section at the fabric store, and luckily, I found some fabrics that were complementary to each other. I'm excited to have finally finished this quilt, and working on it helped me figure out my tastes and come up with designs for new projects--browns and golds and traditional American quilt patterns are all well and good, but I'm envisioning a large quilt with boldly contrasting colors and enormous, asymmetrical, sharp-angled patches for my next quilt. :D

Out of curiosity, do any of y'all have tips on how to make patches the same size and neatly slipstitch? My slipstitches pucker the border and resemble tiny, widely spaced whip stitches rather than being invisible. As for the patches, I measured and cut them with a rotary cutter, ruler, and cutting mat, but they're still irregular.