Teeny Tiny Little Quilt Blocks

I'm taking a little mental health break from query letters this week (my worst rejection so far--"pass but god bless") and re-charging my creative batteries, so to speak. There's been a lot of list-making in the sketchbook (birthday ideas for my cousin Katie, projects I want to make and modify from ), lots of planning of crazy-elaborate projects I may or may not make (Will wanted a pretend birthday cake, so I was thinking some high-density foam, denim, piping, and Eco-fi felt applique decorations?), and hopefully some sewing to come soon (rainbow birthday buntings, help me make time for you!), but today, during Sydney's all-too-short nap, I had an extremely happy time watching the first four episodes of Dollhouse on hulu while cutting out blocks for my postage stamp quilt squares swap over at Craftster:For those of you not CRAZY like I am, postage stamp quilt blocks are 1.5" square; when pieced, these blocks will appear to be 1" square. I do already have a ton cut out from a previous swap, but I've been afraid of touching them for a really long time after I somehow messed up piecing them, I do not know how, and ended up with a bunch of quilt blocks whose finished size when pieced was 1"x1.25". I'm still scared by the fact that I DO NOT KNOW what I was doing wrong.

The fun thing about cutting out postage stamp quilt squares is making fussy cuts, so that you preserve the image of a flower, or a kittycat face, or whatever, in your tiny little block. The challenging thing is cutting extremely accurately. A gridded self-healing mat and a gridded clear plastic rule make this much easier:See how, at the left edge of the picture there, you can line up the clear ruler on the gridded mat at the appropriate lines so that the fabric to the right of the ruler is cut accurately?

Good times.

In other news, Willow took a photo of the first flower of springtime in our yard:Since she's just started using my camera this winter, I think this is her very first photo of a growing flower. Ever.

How cool is that?

P.S. Check out my list of art museum web sites that offer interactive children's activities--it's over at Eco Child's Play.

Better and Worse

I've been a busy little bee lately, through better and worse. Better--I've discovered that the Instant Play feature of the Netflix membership Aunt Pam gave me for Christmas is awesome! I've spent all my free time the past few days cutting out postage stamp squares for my swap and pasting clippings of my comic strip, Still Life with Grad Student, into my scrapbooks while watching The Office seasons one and two and Dead Like Me season two, all on the comfort of my Internet connection.

Worse--this afternoon, with Willow at school and Sydney just down for a nap, I managed to step on a broken sewing machine needle and embed it into my heel, nothing sticking out but a sliver of silver and some thread. I tried to pull it out myself, just could not do it, called my partner and got his voicemail, fantasized about waking Sydney up and driving us over the the walk-in clinic but just could not imagine how that would work, and so limped, barefoot, in the 35-degree freezing rain, over to my next door neighbor's house. Her mother-in-law, visiting from India, took one look and left the room, but all Marianne herself said was "Oh, my God," before sitting me down on the floor and deftly extracting the needle, although she did not tell me exactly when she was going to do it, as I specifically instructed her to. The mother-in-law re-entered to give me a tissue, as I was bleeding onto their carpet, but she wouldn't let me apply pressure to the wound, instead insisting that I squeeze it "to let the toxins out." It may fly in the face of conventional US medicine, but that actually makes a lot of sense to me. I also got a special disinfectant imported from India, and a special poofy bandage Marianne got at the hospital while giving birth, so all in all, it was still pretty awesome.

Postage Stamps are Tiny

I just signed up for a terrific swap on Craftster. It all began with this forum about postage stamp quilts, which are quilts made from 1.5" blocks. One-and-a-half inches! So it takes 144 blocks to make one square foot of quilt, and you can just go ahead and multiply that by the size of quilt you want. I suggest that you choose your smallest bed. I think it sounds awesome, mostly because I like to quilt using squares, because I like how they all line up so nicely, but there are only a certain number of things one can do with a square. And this is another thing.

So I signed up for this swap, the Postage Stamp Quilt Squares swap. I'll be in a group with, say, 9 or 10 other people, and we'll each make up a set of, say 60 quilt squares for each of the people in our group, so maybe 600 squares in all, which is a lot, but in turn, each of those people will be sending me a set of 60 quilt squares, so I'll have 600 new squares in the end, and I can actually start sewing my quilt.

I requested a book from the Monroe County Public Library entitled Quilts A to Z: 26 Techniques Every Quilter Should Know. I haven't read it yet, but apparently P is for Postage Stamp Quilts, and the author uses fusible webbing to line up all the quilt blocks military-style so that everything comes out nice and straight upon sewing. It's definitely a technique I'm into trying out, because even with my 10.5" quilt blocks, I occasionally get a little off-line, and I imagine that the saving grace that offsets the chaotic colors and patterns of a postage stamp quilt is the precision with which the blocks are lined up.

Postage stamp quilts are really popular on Crafster, with its DIY no-matter-what ethic, but they're not as popular on etsy, maybe because they take so damn long that there can only be so much profit in it. There is at least one really beautiful example up right now, though: isewisew writes that her postage stamp quilt is entirely hand-pieced and hand-quilted. All I can say? Wow.