Enforced Family Fun Day: Punk Rock, Mystery Cemeteries, and Several Local Barns

I swear that I do not know what these guys would do with themselves if I wasn't around to always be suggesting fun family activities. It's definitely an insidious form of emotional labor, constantly finding and planning stuff to do and cajoling people out of the house to do it when they'd apparently be happy enough just holding the couch down all weekend, but the secret is that it's all for ME. *I'M* the one who likes to do family stuff, and stuff outside of the house, and I'd be bummed to go out alone. 

To be fair, I knew from the beginning that my excellent idea of hitting up the Monroe County History Center on a Sunday afternoon was only going to be a "fun" family activity for me. But hey, there's an exhibit on local barns! AND an exhibit on the local punk scene! And there's lots of bonding to be done in shared misery, but fine, we'll add in a walk afterwards over to the bakery that has delicious milk tea and crepe cakes by the slice. 

See? Family fun for all!

Alas, the teenagers were completely unimpressed by barns and immediately wandered off to gaze at John Mellencamp's guitar and such:

So they missed out on the excellent visual explanation of the difference between hand-hewn and milled timbers. This one is hand-hewn:

The milled one is in the background:

I thought this illustration of immigrants and where they settled was interesting, not just for what it shows about the spread of barn architecture, but also because it perfectly reflects my own ancestors' path from Ireland to Virginia to Ohio:

One of those early 1800s ancestors changed his last name in adulthood and moved far away from his entire extended family and down to Arkansas (of all places), and if you think I am not burning with curiosity about what brought that on then you have seriously underestimated my capacity for gossip.

Anyway, this was a really cool exhibit because it took all the old barns around the county that you always notice when you drive by and it wrote up a whole museum display about each of them:

My favorite part in each blurb is learning what each barn is up to these days. 4-H is POPULAR around here!

I like the Vernacular style best. That style is essentially just something along the lines of, "I need to build me a barn. A plan, you say? Who needs a plan to build a barn?" 

I see this barn the most, because it's over by the post office that's open the latest:

I'd mostly wanted to go to this museum to see the exhibit on the local punk scene. I feel like the punk scene was kind of on the wane by the time I got to Bloomington (although I swear I remember Pretty Pony), but, perhaps thanks to having a stellar music school here, there have always been plenty of indie musicians. My best memory is the time I used part of my grad school scholarship to sign up for a recreational yoga class, then halfway through the first class suddenly thought, "Huh, is my yoga teacher one of the Blake Babies?"

Why yes, she was! And if you think that I did not come to the next class with my Blake Babies CDs (Innocence and Experience is my favorite!) for her to sign... then you would be right, because I have always been and will always be way too bashful for that. 

ANYWAY, I'm super impressed by all the ephemera that the museum has. Flyers and set lists and receipts and zines are all the types of precious things that are so unlikely to make it into a museum, but THIS museum has a bonanza of items:

I'm equally impressed that the museum has such a substantial list of the punk groups that performed in Bloomington. That type of info is more ephemeral than their promo flyers, and yet the exhibit had five lines' worth of band names extending across the entire wall:

I VERY much wish they could have also had listening stations or some kind of way that we could hear the archival music, but I guess that would be a copyright nightmare.

One last very boring-to-everyone-but-me exhibit:

Notice all the cemeteries that are now in the lake. Once upon a time, my Girl Scout troop learned the whole dishy story of how that happened! 

Y'all KNOW how I feel about old local cemeteries!

I've got a couple more to look for now, thanks to this wall map:

This map says that there's another cemetery across the street from the Mt. Salem Cemetery--that's the one that has the 116-year-old guy--but on Google Maps all there is there is forest and an old quarry. Ten bucks says I get arrested this year for trespassing (wearing my high-visibility safety vest, of course, because hunters) in old limestone quarries!

After all that learning, crepe cake and milk tea really hit the spot:

It was the younger kid who first convinced us to try this place; she'd been wanting to try crepe cake FOREVER, and she was so stoked! Joke's on her, though, I guess, because it turns out that she doesn't super like crepe cake, and the first milk tea she got here was kind of weird, too (for the love of all that's good, keep your picky kids away from taro!), so now she's not into it anymore but the older kid and I love it so we keep dragging her here endlessly. 

Thai milk tea and matcha crepe cake is the perfect taste combo!

And what's this week's (Enforced) Fun Family Activity, you ask? Well, last night three of us went out to a local theater production, then we met up with the fourth one for late-night tacos downtown. And tonight there's supposed to be a cabaret-style performance of a selection of songs from Sondheim's Assassins in a downtown bar that claims to be open to 18+ for the show. I have no idea how to act in a bar--do you get to order a cocktail, or are you supposed to stick to beer? If the latter, what beer do you get?--so that will be a fun adventure.

P.S. Want to know more about my adventures in life, and my looming mid-life crisis? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

I Made Quilted Stationery Sets for the Class of 2024 Because It Would Kill Me To Simply Give Them Gift Cards

Did I tell you that we have construction people in the house AGAIN?!?

We're rounding in on the one-year anniversary of that time that a tree fell on our house, but considering that the roof people didn't even finish that job until well into winter, and that thanks to that nightmare we have not had a single year without a construction project since 2020, I feel like I should probably replace the disused menu board in my kitchen with a sign that reads, "It's been [#] Days Since We've Last Had Construction People in the House."

This current construction project actually stems from the 2022 project of replacing the hideous floors in the kids' bedrooms. When the workers ripped out the floor in the older kid's room, they saw a ton of water damage on one exterior wall and they theorized that the old concrete porch out there might be funneling water towards the house. Sometimes this company will add on another project to the one we already hired them to do--that's how we got the kids' bathroom floor retiled!--but we had to get back in line for this one. It was a LONG line, I guess, since our turn has just come up again, but it's for the best, probably, since, you know, it took us half of 2023 to get a roof back on our house!

I was sort of afraid this porch project would result in them having to rip out and remake all the exterior walls facing the porch, since that's generally how our luck has run, but this time we were lucky! None of the water damage needed anything that extensive, none of the termite damage(!!!) turned out to be current, and the porch didn't even need to be repoured. Instead, we've got some brand-new watertight sealing on the exterior walls around the porch, and all-new termite- and water-free wood inside. And the guy putting on the siding only got stung by wasps twice.

And because you never want to let these guys leave when you've got them here (remember that long line!), my partner got them to agree to fix a shockingly janky wall in the older kid's bedroom, so to circle back around to my first sentence, THAT'S why we've got workers in the house right now. 

And the whole point of that story is that I'm too bashful to sew in the room that the wall guy has to pass through 40,000 times per day, so instead of doing this project leisurely over the course of a week, as I'd envisioned, I instead panic-sewed most of it during the day he got called to a different site, thoroughly warping my personality by listening to my fairy smut on headphones the entire time. 

My idea was that I would quilt each graduate a set of postcards and stamp them, but 1) the price of postcard stamps is now so high that you might as well just buy regular Forever stamps, and 2) my partner and older kid both thought that my quilted postcards, while they really are a thing that can be mailed, were so nice that the recipients would fret at tossing them willy-nilly in the mail as-is. So although I kept the postcard format, my older kid helped me make envelopes for them out of our stash scrapbook paper ("Are we EVER going to use up all this paper?!?" she groused, but to be fair, this single pad of 12"x12" paper *has* seemed to pop up in every paper project we've done since about 2010 or so!), and I pre-stamped them for college student mailing convenience. 

My favorite thing about these postcards is how they serve as a sort of sampler for all the patchwork techniques I currently know. Here are some triangle hexies:

That batik canvas is from the first curtains I ever sewed!

Here are a variety of log cabins:

These are actually all postage square quilt blocks I made over a decade ago... before I learned how to sew a straight seam and properly square things, ahem:

And these are new postage stamp quilt blocks made from stash, because I'm still in the habit of cutting and saving 1.5" pieces from my last bits of scraps whenever I sew:

Inside this quilt block is the very last square inch of the purple striped fabric that used to be the ring sling that was my very first sewing project ever. I wore both my babies in it!

And here's my newest-to-me technique, the quilt-as-you-go method!

And because my NEWEST newest-to-me technique isn't quilting but gif-making, here's a gif of all my quilted postcards--I've learned how to slow down the frame rate, so it's not quite as obnoxious as my quilted coasters gif:

And here's all the envelopes ready to be stuffed!

I sewed zippered pouches to hold the stationery sets, a nice pen, and a glue stick since my homemade envelopes aren't self-sealing, ahem. 

Most of these stationery sets are now with their recipients, ready to have records of college adventures written on them and sent off to loved ones. I kind of want to see what it would look like to put a quilted patchwork front onto a single-fold greeting card, though, and I also want to make a few more of these postcards for myself, because in my experience, college students like to receive mail even more than they like to send it!

P.S. Want to know more about my adventures in life, and my looming mid-life crisis? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

How to Sew a Mini Quilt Block Coaster

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

A mini quilt block coaster is a useful–and beautiful!–way to destash some of your prettiest quilting cottons.

I do not know what happens to all of my coasters! Over the years I’ve made tile coasters, chalkboard coasters, and endless quilt block coasters, and nearly all of those are simply… gone! To be honest, I probably don’t want to know why they go missing so regularly in the house I share with my partner and two teenagers, but just between us, I suspect foul play.

It’s fine, though. I do LOVE the hexagonal rainbow quilt block coasters that I sewed four years ago–rather, I love the single one of those that still exists in my family room!–but change is fun. Anyway, a new set of coasters is a great way to destash a bit of my quilting cotton!

For this project, I was specifically excited about destashing the last bit of a super cute honeybee print that I’ve had for quite a while and was down to its very last 1/16 or so of a yard. There wasn’t a panel of it wide enough to do much of anything with, but there were just enough bees left on it, at just the right size, for me to fussy cut the center piece of a set of bright, summery quilt block coasters.

So that’s what I did!

Turning a mini quilt block into a coaster is an easy project–all the hard work is in sewing that quilt block, after all! Here’s how to do it!

Materials

You will need:

• mini quilt block. Any quilt block that’s approximately coaster-sized, say between 4 and 6 inches wide, will work for this project. If you want something bigger, just call it a mug rug! For mini quilt block ideas, check out my mini log cabin quilt block tutorial.
• cotton batting or equivalent. Coasters are actually a great way to use up the last scraps of cotton batting leftover from a quilt project. I also like to use recycled polyester felt; if the felt is on the thin side, like craft felt often is, you can double it up for this project.
• backing fabric. This back-to-front binding piece should be 1″ larger than the quilt block on all sides.
• measuring, cutting, and sewing supplies.

Step 1: Cut the batting.

Iron and square the mini quilt block, then set it directly on the felt or batting and use it as a template to cut the piece to size.

One of the nice things about both felt and batting is that they’re a bit grippy, so if you’re moving straight to the next step you don’t even really need to pin this. But a few clips around the edges are also fine!

Step 2: Measure and cut the backing fabric to size.

Prep your backing fabric by washing, ironing, etc., then lay it right side down onto your work surface. I like to set my quilt block + batting stack right side up directly on top of the backing fabric, then use a clear, gridded quilting ruler to cut the backing fabric 1″ wider than the quilt block on all sides.

You’ll need to trim the corners of the backing fabric to reduce bulk in the binding. I always just eyeball this by first ironing the corners down, as in the above photo, then hand-cutting them off about halfway between that fold and the corner of the quilt block.

Step 3: Sew the binding.

Fold each side in to touch the edge of the quilt block, then iron to crease. Then, fold each side in again at the edge of the quilt block, bringing that first folded edge over the quilt block to create the binding. Adjust the corners by hand until they look tidy; you can make them look mitered or leave them as-is, as long as there are no raw fabric edges showing.

Stitch the edge of the binding down to the coaster. On my sewing machine, a basic Singer Heavy Duty, I use a zigzag stitch with a width of 3 and a length of 2.

That’s the entire process to make a coaster! I made six coasters, some with hearts and some with bees, and I’ve already thrown a couple in the wash because apparently we’re all messy coffee drinkers in this family. I LOVE that these coasters are as easily washable as our quilts and clothes!

Because these coasters are so summery, AND because I’ve got so much fabric, ahem, I’m already thinking about the idea of using these seasonally and sewing some different coasters that we can use in the autumn and winter. Little skull centers with orange, black, and purple frames would be perfect for October, don’t you think? And perhaps little hearts with pink, purple, and white frames for Valentine’s Day?

P.S. Want to know more about our adventures in learning, and the resources that we use to accomplish them? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

I Love My New Mini Quilt Block Coasters

Also, look what I learned how to do!

It's nifty, but a little of that gif goes a loooooong way--please feel free to scroll down until you can't see it! I'll wait!

That's more soothing, right? Now, let's begin.

As of today, I think I've finally broken out of my months-long obsession with mini quilt blocks--nothing like a seven-hour session sewing mini quilt blocks to finish up gifts for my two favorite members of the Class of 2024 to break me... I mean, break me OUT. Ahem.

I also might have damaged my mind by listening to A Court of Mist and Fury pretty much that entire time. At one point I walked through the family room, where both kids have so far spent their summer doing their darndest to keep the couch from flying away (and it makes my heart sing with joy to see it!), and I was all, "Kids! I am so worried about Feyre's plan to steal the Book of Breathings! I know she's the only person who can stop the King of Hyburn from using the magic cauldron, but you can't winnow into the building where it's hidden! It's too dangerous!"

The kids gave each other that look that I don't understand since I'm an only child, but I think it means something along the lines of "What are we going to do about Mom?", and then one of them carefully said, "Um, are you still reading that fairy smut?"

Y'all. This one is barely smutty at all! And it turns out that it's very good! It even provides some fixes for stuff from the first book that makes it less stupid!

Anyway... the grad gifts I sewed are sooooo darling, and as a bonus I was able to use up several practice mini quilt blocks I'd made without knowing what I wanted to do with them. Y'all KNOW how much I love using up stuff!

Before that, though, I made these!

Oh, and this guy, too:

I used the mini log cabin quilt blocks that I have the tutorial for here. I couldn't get the binding quite as tidy as I'd wanted--I'm a sucker for mitered corners without any real ability to attain them--but the stitching and piecing is just about as neat as I've ever done. I have FINALLY learned the lesson of picking a seam allowance and sticking to it!

Or not, because for this project I cut a ton of fabric 1.5" wide, and whenever I wanted to vary the finished width of a piece I played with varying my seam allowance. It only kind of worked, because for some reason I couldn't figure out how to make the log cabin pieces around the bee .5" wide after sewing a .25" seam on the other side to preserve my fussy cut bee--

But whatever. It still keeps my coffee from dripping onto the table:

My newest innovation comes from splurging on some gridded mylar stencil sheets, because I cut a template for the 1.5" square that let me fussy cut my pieces, perfectly centering the element I wanted to feature. That and these plastic sewing clips that I'm still delighted by have transformed my sewing for the better!

I've got a proper tutorial for sewing these coasters scheduled for Wednesday, and then I'll show off the patchwork quilted grad gifts that I'm SUUUUPER excited about. 

And then I should probably get started learning how to Foundation Paper Piece, because I can't send my baby off to college without a bookshelf quilt!

P.S. Want to know more about my adventures in life, and my looming mid-life crisis? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Sew a Mini Square in a Square Log Cabin Quilt Block

My log cabin quilt block obsession has grown both larger… and smaller!

The log cabin was the second quilt block that I ever learned to sew (everyone’s first quilt block should be the Nine-Patch!), and it’s remained my absolute favorite. It’s the kind of block whose versatility works for both newer sewists–wonky pieces are absolutely acceptable here!–and advanced sewists who want to experiment with color, value, and dimension.

My current obsession is mini quilt blocks, and I’m loving one specific type of log cabin quilt block, the square in a square subset, for highlighting a fussy cut center piece. The pieces around it, while constructed in the traditional log cabin way, make a series of frames that further highlight that piece, similar to the concept of highlighting the red “hearth” piece in the center of a traditional log cabin quilt block.

Even with this very simple block pattern, there’s a lot of scope for the imagination. I wanted something summery, so I’m playing with yellows and oranges, but there’s an infinite amount of variety of color and width to be played about with here.

Here’s how to make these mini square in a square log cabin quilt blocks:

Materials

You will need:

• fabric. Even though it’s a bit of a waste of fabric, depending on what width I choose for my log pieces, I’m cutting all my fabric 1.5″ wide and then simply adjusting my seam allowance to get the finished width that I want. My narrowest log pieces will be .5″ wide, so for those I’ll also be sewing with a .5″ seam allowance. The pieces that I want to end up 1″ wide will get a more traditional .25″ seam allowance.
• measuring, cutting, and sewing supplies. I LOVE a clear, gridded quilting ruler for precise measuring and cutting. I cut the strips with a self-healing cutting mat and rotary cutter, and I fussy cut the center square using a pair of sharp sewing scissors. To make the fussy cutting even easier, I recently splurged on a piece of gridded plastic that I could use to make my own cutting templates. It’s NOT eco-friendly, but I love it and I’ll use it forever! For machine sewing, I like a narrow, sharp needle and matching thread. And like it or not, you have to have an iron!

Step 1: Cut the pieces.

Above, you can see that I’ve got my colorway figured out and my pieces chosen. All the strips are 1.5″ wide, and the center block is 1.5″ square. The little heart in the middle is just .25″ square, so I’m going to aim for all my finished logs to be .5″ wide. That means that all my seam allowances will be .5″. It’s overkill and don’t tell the quilting police, but just between us, I kind of love piecing with a wider seam allowance. It always feels so much easier for my fumbly fingers to handle!

Step 2: Frame the center piece.

Line up the seams of the first log piece and one side of the center block, wrong sides together. This first log piece will be the shortest, and although you won’t be able to tell by more than the lines of stitching, since all the pieces of this frame will be the same color, I nevertheless like to place it at the bottom.

I don’t like to start my stitching at the very edge of the fabric, because I can’t figure out how to keep the fabric from bunching at that edge when I do (let me know if you have tips!), so I like to offset the log pieces and then trim the extra away after sewing each seam.

Sew the seam, then use your sharp sewing scissors to trim each side of the log piece to match the edge of the center piece. Unfold and finger press the seam to whichever side you prefer–for this project, I’m pressing the seams open, but again, I think that’s something that I don’t want you to tell the quilting police that I do…

Above is the block that I sewed from the right side. You can tell that the top left is a little uneven, and if you want you can trim it down so it’s perfect again before you continue sewing.

Do I want to, though? Nope!

Here’s the block from the back side:

One piece of advice that I did receive once upon a time, and that I DO follow, is to iron quilt blocks from the right side, not the wrong side like in the photo above. I don’t know why that is but I do it anyway.

Sew the next three log pieces just the way you sewed the first one, continuing to border that center piece.

Each time, you’ll trim the log piece to match the two sides of the block, then iron the seam open (or to the side you prefer!) from the right side:

Remember that you can always trim the block to the correct size, so I don’t think you should get too fussy if one of your seams is a little imprecise. These blocks are tiny!

Your complete frame will look like the photo below:

Notice that you can see the lines of stitching for each piece in the frame, but that won’t really be visible if you’re not looking at it with your nose two inches from it like we are right now.

Step 3: Continue piecing additional frames.

Add as many additional frames as you want to this log cabin quilt block. I kept up with the .5″ seams for this quilt block, and you can see in the photo above that it’s definitely added “dimension” to the quilt block, but I don’t think it made it too bulky. I think I’m going to use these quilt blocks for coasters, anyway, so a little more thickness will just make them more absorbent.

I think that it looks the nicest to continue rotating the blocks and adding pieces in the order that you started with the first frame. So if you went clockwise like I did in the above photo, keep going clockwise! And even though we’re still looking at it with our noses two inches from the block, I think the stitching in the frames already looks less obvious, and it will continue to fade into the background the more frames you add.

Here’s my finished quilt block, below:

Instead of adding another frame with that 1.5″ strip I have there, I’m going to use a different piece of that fabric to sew a back-to-front binding when I turn this, and several of its identical friends, into coasters.

But the world is your oyster when you’re choosing what YOU want to do with your square in a square mini log cabin quilt block! You could make a zippered pouch, or a needle book, or a quilted postcard, or gather it together with 359 more mini quilt blocks and make a whole quilt top.

Let me know what you end up making--you know I'm nosy like that!

P.S. Want to know more about our adventures in learning, and the resources that we use to accomplish them? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!