Quilting

I haven't made much knitting progress, but that's because most of my free time has been spent quilting. I haven't done much quilting before (just a couple of small projects), but I have a big project planned.

When my Grandfather died, he left a lot of collections. It was very easy to find family members who wanted most of these collections. However, some of them were a bit more challenging to find homes for. One of the more difficult collections was his ties. He had somewhere around 300 ties. Some of them are in better condition than others, and most of them are very out of style. There are wide ties and skinny ties, silk ties and wool ties. There are ties that are solids, stripes, paisleys, plaid, and polka-dots. They are red, brown, blue, yellow, purple.... Well, you get the idea. Anyway, his ties are now at my parents' house waiting for me to make a quilt out of them.

However, there's the small problem that I don't have a lot of quilting experience. And from what I understand, quilting with ties isn't the easiest thing. So I decided to start practicing. I bought some fabric at a local store (meaning I chose from about 15 different fabrics) and started piecing. Here's what I have so far:



I realized as I was editing the picture that the block on the right should be turned 90 degrees to the right. But the pattern will start to make more sense when I have more blocks done. The pattern is called "Kaleidoscope". Each block measures 6" square, so it's going to take a lot of blocks to make anything decent sized. But I think that this is going to be a very small quilt that I will probably hang on a wall somewhere. I want to try out a few different patterns, and get some practice sewing on borders, backing it, quilting, etc. so a series of smaller quilts will probably be more useful than one big one.

I'm doing all of the sewing by hand. I have a sewing machine, and I know how to use it, but I've been sewing by hand since I was a small child, and I actually like doing it. So far I'm pretty happy with how the corners are lining up, and my stitches seem to be small enough. When I start noticing a significant change in the quality of my work, I'll start a new project. And hopefully I'll keep fitting in a few rows of knitting here and there!