Painting Speech

I’ve had a little time to work some more on this baby quilt, which is now quite behind the times. At this point I’m more tardy than the baby was premature! Still, I have hopes of finishing it in short order.

After several false starts, I decided to make an organically built scrap quilt, from squares and half-square triangles exclusively. I made a ton of half-square triangles with finished size of 1 inch. (See my earlier post about that.) At that I stepped back in horror and wondered what possessed me to work at a 1-inch scale. So I made some half-square triangles and squares at double size (a whopping 2 inches, for those who are mathematically challenged). And then I started putting them together as seemed pleasing. I’ve got seven squares together now, and the makings of probably another five squares right there on the top step of the stairs that lead up from the basement sewing room. If that doesn’t seem enough, I’ll continue making more pieces, or maybe just have some blank squares interspersed.

It’s very unusual for me to begin with only a cellular plan and no overall plan.

I’m liking it.

In between teaching a manuscript book class, some web design work, and my daily alphabets, I’ve been doing some quilting … on the Farmer’s Wife quilt-along (link to this week’s squares) with my sister, but also on a baby quilt.

After some false starts, I’ve decided to take a grassroots approach to it, starting with the unit — the half-square triangle (HST) —and building up. I started with one 9-inch square of fabric. Two 9-inch squares sandwiched together, sewn and cut apart yield 32 HSTs. Here I’ve just cut the top and right edges. Then I rotated the cut piece of fabric and cut the other two sides.

Next I marked the sewing and cutting lines. I will sew 1/4″ away from either side of each diagonal line and then cut on the line, while all straighten lines will be just cut. It’s hard to keep track of which lines are sewn next to and which are not, so I’ve learned to mark indicated the sewing lines with a couple of additional dotted lines within each section of the diagonal lines. You can see them more clearly if you click on the thumbnail at left. This image shows all of the diagonal lines — the primary X and the secondary diagonals that form a diamond — and the primary straight lines that form a cross. But this image doesn’t show the secondary straight lines that would intersect the four X’s.

Here I’ve sewn on the primary diagonal lines and then cut on the lines. (And you can now see the secondary straight lines in this image.) Next, I’ll sew on the secondary diagonal lines, then cut them apart, then cut on all the cut-only lines. Now I have 32 folded triangles. The left image below shows one quarter of the 9-inch square partially cut part, and one pair of HSTs ironed open. The next image show three pairs of HSTs ironed open.

 

 

 

 

I’ve done this with four 9-inch square sandwiches, each a different fabric pairing, yielding 144 HSTs total. You can see two sets of these HSTs in the photo above right. These will finish at 1 inch square, which is small. But let’s see: 32 inches x 32 inches means that already the quilt is nearly 3 feet square. I’ll do some more HSTs to finish at double the size, 2 inches square. I’ll start with 6.5-inch squares, but only make the primary X and cross, to yield 16 HSTs about 3 inches square, trim to 2-1/2 inches square, for a finished size of 2 inches square.

Then we’ll see how they might fit together.