The Better to See You with My Dear

Sewing is going pretty slowly these days. For one thing, I have very little time to sew right now, doing tons of babysitting. For another, when chain-sewing massive numbers of tiny quilt pieces, it takes a long time for it to look like anything.

The only thing I can show you that looks like much is my first sawtooth star for the penguin quilt. The fabric in the center of the sawtooth star is leftover from making DH a scrub top. I need five of the sawtooth stars, and I am doing them as leaders/enders right now. Notice something about my penguin block- no eyes. I have four of these guys and no eyes on any of them yet. I really need to get those on, but I'd need to rethread the machine, and change the presser foot, and all that jazz, so it can wait. I was auditioning the border fabric and trying to figure out sashing and cornerstones. I think I will use a silvery gray for the sashing and white for the cornerstones.

The border fabric I think will look great. I picked it up at a thrift store when I was making the penguin blocks for Quiltmaker. I got to make some really cool blocks while testing for them. I believe the penguin block is in Quiltmaker's 100 blocks Volume 4.


This is what my sewing cabinet looks like right now. I am working on the border blocks for the pink/black beast. They are mostly pink, but you can't tell that yet. This quilt is based on a half log cabin design, but you have to piece every log before you can add it on. The four patches with one pink square in the bottom right hand corner of the photo is the corner of the half log cabins. Towards the top of the photo you can see I have the next two logs pieced and ready to sew on. One block in this quilt is made up of four half log cabin blocks. There are two each of two different half log cabin blocks. I decided to start with the more complicated of the blocks. It will likely be weeks before you can see a completed block, since I have so many blocks to make, and I am chain-piecing, working on all of the identical blocks at once. It seems to take forever on a pattern like this to get anywhere when chain piecing, but the up side of that is everything comes together all at once.

I'll try to take some photos now and then of the pink/black beast, but really, it won't look like much for a while. I am hoping to cut out the rally quilts this weekend, and use them as leaders/enders once my penguin sawtooth stars are finished. Only one quilt will be raffled off this year at the rally, but I designed two, and I am not sure which one is more appropriate for this year's rally, so I am going to work on the blocks for both, and leave the applique for after I know which to use this year. I'll use the other one next year, and this way I'll have a head start on it, so not a bad plan.

The only days off I have from babysitting in the next week are Saturday and Tuesday. Saturday I hope to cut two quilts out and sew a little if I have time, Tuesday I will try to sew quite a bit.