Monday, September 3, 2012

Happy Labor Day!

Happy Labor Day to all and please join this blog as a follower and leave a comment to be eligible for the Fabulous Four Fat Quarters giveaway! Tonight at midnight is the last moment.

Today is also the day that Matthew (our unofficially adopted 22 year old son) packed up his stuff from being stored in our attic and loaded it all into Felix's Mountaineer for the brief drive to New Hampshire Technical Institute for his second year of the two year program in Information Technology.
He needs to check in at the bursar's office, buy a few books? and most importantly register at his assigned dorm where he will move in and spend the night. Felix is taking him and they grabbed the Mc Donald's coupons from last Sunday's paper to do lunch, and possibly bring back a meal for Matthew for tonight just in case the dining commons is closed for the Labor Day holiday.

Felix also agreed to stop off on the way home and wash my big "Pawprints" quilt at the lovely Louden laundromat named "Just Wash It!" They have wonderful large front loaders for big quilts. I forgot to give him the Shout Color Catchers but this is the third time this quilt is being washed so I think it will be okay. Do you see why it needs to be washed? LOL!

The other quilty thing that I've been chugging along on is that Civil War scraps top I'm making from Snowballs & Negative 9-patches. Yesterday I finished sewing the rows together and snapped a quick photo on the blacktop driveway just before dark. I thought everything looked okay with it.

Uh oh! Imagine my surprise when I looked at this picture!
Do you see the two "mistake" blocks? All of the 9-patches are supposed to be "negative", that is, have more light background squares than the color. But there are two red checkerboard-looking squares, one in the lowest bottom row second from the left, that are wrong! The other one is located in the second row from the top, the third block in.
Good grief! Well, I know what happened. When I was fooling around with just starting to make these Civil War nine patches, I goofed and made a couple that were "positive." Later, when I began laying out the quilt, those two got mixed in and I never noticed them. LOL!

So I began my day today doing "frog-stitching"! Rippit! Rippit! Rippit! I got the Purina blocks removed very carefully and replaced them with some of the extra negative 9-patches that were already made up. Here is the result.


Now you can see the flow of the secondary pattern and why this is also known as "Twisted Ribbons." The top is only 55" square which seems small to me. I know it needs light wide border but now I'm wondering if I should make and add a couple more rows to get it to be a reasonably sized bed quilt? What do you think?

10 comments:

Beth in MN said...

Aren't cameras a wonderful tool? I like your civil war quilt. It is amazing how easy blocks can make such wonderful graphic quilts. Have to admit I would probably make the quilt larger or at least longer. So many lap quilts only cover either the toes or the shoulders but not both. Happy Labor Day!

Mrs A said...

go for it, the bigger the better!

Auntie Em said...

"Purina blocks" took me a second to get that one, but I loved it.

It's a very pretty pattern. Bet you could find a few pretty CW fabrics to make it a bit bigger without having to look too hard, right?

Kathy said...

I met you when you were doing your pillow case demo that the Belknap Quilt show a year ago - I have become an expert at making these cases. Love your blog!!!! I think I would make the quilt a little bigger so you can really curl up in it.
Kathy Parsons

Nancy said...

I haven't seen this pattern before. One of the reasons I like it is because we see the strong diagonal but only the small corners are cut on the bias. I agree with your other commenters about making it bigger. It would be easier to make it bigger now than always wish you had after it was finished. Best wishes to your son for success in his second year of school.

Nann said...

I usually "end at the end" and that determines the size of my quilts. (See the batik 9-p I posted yesterday.) I think you could enlarge this with 10" borders: 2" inner border, then 9-patches, then a 2" outer border. That would add 20" both horizontally and vertically.

Andee said...

Really love the visual light and dark pattern on that quilt...is it from a book? I have made this pattern but LOVE that light and dark illusion...gonna have to make one like this!

bertiequilts said...

I would say to add a few more blocks as a border wide enough to make it bigger would overwhelm the pattern... I love it

Helen in the UK said...

Best wishes to Matthew as he starts year 2. Glad you spotted the 9patch boo-boo before it became a serious pain to fix. Sometimes you can see in photos what you can't see in person :)

beth said...

What a lovely, lovely quilt!

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