Fabric Tuesday/Wip Wednesday

Yesterday was a fun day.  I got to spend 4 1/2 hours with my friend, Bette, doing a workshop at her house! We were working on a Karen Eckmeier's Accidental Landscapes project.  Bette is ahead of me by two projects and is working on her third, so she was able to guide me as to what I was doing.  She's a great teacher. Here's what my book looks like.  

So I started on the practice piece Karen recommends one do before starting on a project.  Here's what fabrics I picked to start with:
 This took a loooooooooooong time to decide what to include. Phew - it took us all the way to lunch time.  Then one has to decide what silhouette your going to use for each piece.  Since this was my first attempt - that took a long time, too, So I decided to generally follow what Karen had done in her practice piece.  I found that amazingly the landscape shapes will be pretty much determined by that first cut. 
Who would have known?


So after much dithering and checking values with a red disk, here's what we came up with:





Mind you this is just laid down right now on a design board.  And I'm thinking the lake has to be smaller so that the mountains don't seem to be floating. Aye de mi!  Off to dither some more.

Since I was tied up most of the day yesterday, I'm posting this as a fabric Tuesday, Linky Tuesday, and a new WIP post today. Go on over to my sidebar and visit those blogs to see what others are up to.





Design Wall Monday 4/23/12

Working on two St. Anne's quilts for a family where the single mom with 4 kids (16, 15, 4 and 5)  has stage 4 cancer.  We are making all of them a quilt even dear grandson who is only 2 months.  Have 4 done; working on the last two for the teenage girls. They are tube quilts and went together fast.  By opening the tubes at different seams, they look different, but similar.  What do you think?
 What's on your design wall?  Go on over to Judy's Patchwork Times and see what eye candy people are working on. (sidebar).

Stash Report 4/22/12

It was a good week for destashing - at least for my goals that is.  I have pulled 4 1/4 yards for two charity quilt backs I have started.  I made a quiltlet (.22 yd )and finished a mug rug (.04 yd).  Now you're probably wondering how I got those numbers in parentheses.  And I have a friend who wants to know how I figure yardage using scraps so here goes.  When I've finished a project [let's use the mug rug as the example] I measure my piece - in this case it was only the backing that I pulled from my stash.  It measured 7.5 inches square.  Now I found how many square inches there are in a yard (using 36 x 42 measurement).  There are 1512 square inches in this yard.  I'm going to use that as my standard yard.  So I multiplied my mug rug backing  7.5 x 7.5 and got 56.25 sq inches.  I divide that by the 1512 and get 0.0372 or 0.04 of a yd.  That quiltlet that I made - it was 18" square.  Doubled the 18 and divided by 1512 to get .22 yds.  Clear as mud?

When I'm making a scrap block, I lay out my scraps and work out how many inches I took out of my stash.  The little I have left is usually too small to go back into the scrap bin (it's not going back into my stash!), so it isn't added back. Take the photo above.  I laid out my scraps and I would roughly be using a rectangle of fabric that measures 11 x 14 or 154 square inches or .10 yd.

Why do I bother - Hey!  Progress is progress  - no matter how tiny a destash - LOL.  Here are my numbers:
Used/Donated this week: 4.51 yards
Used/Donated YTD:      57.56 yards
Added/Bought this week: 0.00 yards
Added/Bought YTD:        21.5 yards
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Net Decrease YTD:         36.06 yards

How are you doing on your destashing? Go on over to Judy's Patchwork Times and see how others are doing.

Progrees is Made

Progress is made, at least some.  More blocks were added to the baby quilt I was working on (see previous post). More scraps were used. I...