This is page five completed on the "Quaker Virtues" chart, with a bit extra -- I worked most or all of the large motifs that overlap the page breaks, in order to orient myself on the adjoining pages, and most of the smaller motifs. There are nine pages in the chart, but luckily for me the three along the right-hand side are less than half the width of their neighbors, and I think the ones along the bottom edge aren't full sheets either. It is not a particularly user-friendly chart, I'm afraid -- I've quickly become used to the modern charts with an overlapping few rows, which mean that you don't have to keep flipping back and forth between two pages, counting and re-counting to make sure that you're in the right place -- nor does this one even have a darker line every ten squares. I think that pretty soon I will be drawing in the latter myself, having already had to work a couple of these motifs two or three times after counting wrong!
Still -- I'm enjoying it immensely --
This is the first step in the star quilt for Laura. I admit that I am already getting a-weary of little triangles -- it is very slow-going and fiddly, sewing these together. I keep reminding myself that once all of the triangles are together, it's straight lines from there on!
I'm having trouble getting hold of a cream solid fabric that more-or-less matches this cream print -- apparently all of the Joann's stores in Southern California are sold out of all Kona Cotton creams and whites so thoroughly that they aren't even offering it online, and although the word on the vaccines is encouraging it still isn't a good time to go traipsing about to quilt shops (much as I'd like to, she said wistfully), so I've ordered a carefully-curated -- cough-guess-cough! -- trio from Hancock's hoping that at least one will be all right.
I got a pair of miniature sampler kits for Christmas and worked one of them last month, the "Heritage XIX" chart by Annelle Ferguson. I was so pleased with it -- the one at bottom left, "dated" 1798 -- that I resolved to mount and frame the other two that have been sitting in a box for over a year while I wrung my hands over the possibility of any number of things going wrong. The other two samplers are the "Boston Band" by Nancy Sturgeon at upper right, and on the left "Southern Heritage" also by Annelle Ferguson (which was a NAME souvenir from a decade ago, that one of my club members gave to me). I tweaked both of these, eliminating the "V" on the "Boston Band" and shifting the "Z" up to join the rest, in order to add faux initials, and switching out the lower-case alphabet on the "Southern" one for a motto and another faux signature. I had the dickens of a time cutting the moldings, as even a fraction of a millimeter on one piece of the four at this scale can make the frame out of true, and sometimes it was a choice between a true rectangle or a slightly-too-big rectangle -- you might be able to see that at least once I chose "true"! -- but on the whole I'm very pleased with these, mostly because the charts are so charming!
All so pretty. Most of y life is packed into boxes and waiting to move sooner or later at the moment, that means I am vicariously enjoying other peoples labours, that rather suits as I am naturally lazy but love such talent. The first sample is beautiful quite and serene in the colours and the star quilt is going to be amazing, those miniature sampler kits are utterly phenomenal, ohhhh to be a tiny person living with them in my teeny tiny house...
Posted by: juliet brown | February 16, 2021 at 01:17 PM