When Bad Quilts Happen to Good People

Weekly Rant

One thing that drives me nuts – I have this great idea for a quilt in my head, I make the quilt, and the finished product is NOTHING like what I envisioned. Nice…but not what I wanted. Of course, I could probably alleviate that by sketching the design on paper first, but laziness gets in the way.

A case in point: I decided to make a Disappearing 9 Patch pattern (more on that below). I envisioned red, orange and yellow circles to represent the setting sun and a background of blue to represent water. I was going to use palm trees and flamingos as the quilting pattern all over the quilt – make it really tropical. 

Needless to say, it did not come out that way AT ALL and I hated it! Got rid of the thing as fast as I could (I hope my uncle isn’t reading this since he got the quilt!!!).

Fun Facts About Quilts

So about that Disappearing 9 Patch – it’s a very easy pattern that can produce some complex looking designs, depending on how you arrange your colors. And it’s really nothing more than cutting out 9 squares, sewing them together to make a 3 x 3 block, then cutting the block in half both length and width wise. You then have 4 small blocks. Using multiples of these, you can arrange them  in interesting ways. I posted a couple of examples, including my poor wannabe sunset quilt….ugh. 

Current Projects

I had to put aside the two projects I was working on to make a couple of no-sew fleece blankets. One of our cheerleaders and her family lost everything in a and they have 17-month old twins. So I whipped up the blankets this week, which came out pretty well. These are fun projects and easy if you need a last minute gift.

Shameless plug on that BTW: The are sponsoring a fundraiser collecting small electronics such as cell phones, hand-held games and game consoles, iPods, eReaders and laptops. Items can be working or non-working. We will be selling these items on eBay to raise money for the cheerleader and her family. Donations can be dropped off at in Northford on Mondays from 7 to 9 p.m. through April 2 or you can post a comment to me and I will get back to you.

Remember – people look at my quilts, NOT my housework!