Back to the Nine Patches

Yesterday I decided that it was time to layer up the Disappearing Nine Patch quilt top that has been hanging on the back of the door to my sewing room for way too long. It was the last of a long line of DNP quilts I made. All the others had a planned palette and layout but this one was completely scrappy with no plan except to sew 4 sections together into 12 inch blocks that were all in the same orientation value wise. By the time I got 30 blocks done I was all "nine patched out".  I was ready to layer it without a border and quilt it and be done with it. Now after about a year and a half I am ready to do something more. I spread it out on my bed to look at it and decided to make it a more usable size by adding another row of blocks to every side and put a border on it. That means I have to make 26 more blocks and piece an 8 inch border. The picture above is a 1/4 section of the part that is together. I have a gazillion 4 1/2 inch squares already cut because I cut all of my scraps into squares so they would be ready to use. They have been sitting ready and waiting in a box on my closet shelf  for at least 3 years. I only had to cut about 50 light value squares.

Below on the left are 6 blocks ready to be cut in quarters.I made these yesterday and today .

On the right is a 12 inch block showing the orientation of the light and dark value segments. They will all be made like this one, I find it less confusing than laying out the whole quilt in quarter block segments and sewing it together in rows. I always turn something the wrong way.  On the left side of the block picture, behind my flannel work board,  you can see a small section of my Diva Challenge quilt that is up on my sewing room wall. I am really dying to show it but I am waiting for our group reveal. Actually I am waiting very impatiently to see everyones  challenge piece.

It is a good thing I did not layer up the DNP top because the back I had hanging with it is for one of the QAWM pieces . I didn't hang the top with the back because it is on point and I did not want it to sag out of shape.

Guess how I knew not to hang it.

Oh gee whiz!!! I just noticed the spellchecker. It wasn't there before.I have been painstakingly correcting all my typos and looked up and there it is. For how long have I been missing this?

Moving furniture..........Again

This is what I have been doing this week. It is one of our community quilts projects from the quilt guild. In October we had a Saturday work day for our community quilts projects. We cut 2 1/2 inch strips and made up roll-up kits and had about 3 patterns to use. I wasn't able to be there that day but I took one of the left over kits and made a quilt top using the tube quilt technique. Our CQ group meets once a month and I worked on it on those days for 3 months and finally took it home and finished it. I am not sure I would make this again because of all the bias edges but they probably would not be a big problem if it were done without putting it away severel times. I am not very good at keeping at a project when I am working around other people. I am too sociable. That is a nice way of saying I have to stick my nose into everything.

When I am procrastinating I find fault with my sewing space. Not long ago I moved one printer and my computer to a shelf and moved my desk so my monitor was not right in front of the window. Now I don't have to lower my Roman shade in the afternoon. My husband had to lower the shelf so I could see the buttons on top of the printer/scanner with out standing on a step stool. I had taken this closet shelf unit out of my closet a couple of months ago and thought it would be perfect for my printers but each one had to sit on a separate shelf and had to have enough room to open it in case of a paper jam or when I wanted to scan something. I couldn't put all the things I thought I could on the two shelves we could use. So..... yesterday I went to Lowes and got 2 more shelves. I had them cut exactly 23 3/4 inches so they would fit. Well, that didn't happen! One shelf was 23 1/2 and the other was 23 1/2 at the back and 23 1/4 at the front. I found this out after I made a trip back to the store to get the right size shelf pins. After some thought I took two shelves out of the unit in my closet and put the ones in the closet that didn't quite fit nicely. It doesn't matter there if they don't look as nice. This made it necessary for me to enlist my husbands help in putting a couple of screws through the shelf pins so the short shelves would not fall.  Jack is a nice patient husband and I am not going to tell him that I have to move the one shelf so I can get two baskets on the shelf that he questioned me about putting it where I said I wanted it.  I can fix that myself.

This is around the corner from my re-purposed shelf unit. A couple of months back when I started moving everything around when I ended up this little chest had nowhere to go but in front of my bookcase and it is full of stuff and heavy . Yesterday when I was at Lowes I bought some little Super Slider sticky pads and now I can move the chest around easilyto get at what I want from the bottom 2 shelves. Everything in my room has sliders or casters because everything has to move around for different purposes. For now I am pretty content but I have a few more things I want to change. I almost never move furniture anywhere else in our apartment. I figure out the best arrangement and that is where things stay unless we need to make room for something new.